The third summer picture for August is The Montagne Sainte-Victoire, by Paul Cezanne. Painted in 1887, this radiantly beautiful landscape painting can be seen at the Courtauld Galleries in London.
The painting bears a prominent signature, “P.Cezanne”, in its bottom right-hand corner. Cezanne did not generally sign his work in the late 1880s, so this is an unusual detail. The artist’s early biographer Joachim Gasquet provided an explanation for it. In 1895, Cezanne showed this picture at a modest exhibition in his native Aix-en-Provence. The young Gasquet introduced himself to the painter and, by his own account, infuriated him with his effusions of praise for the work. Eventually, he managed to persuade Cezanne of his sincerity and the artist amazed his new admirer by signing the painting and giving it to him. Gasquet certainly once owned it – the provenance shows that he sold it for a very high price, just two years after Cezanne’s death – so his story seems credible.
As well as explaining the signature in its corner, Joachim Gasquet wrote an account of how Cezanne actually painted the picture. “He was at his brother-in-law’s. He had planted his easel in the shade of a clump of pines. He had worked there for two months, one canvas in the morning, one in the afternoon. The work was ‘going well’. He was cheerful. The session was almost over. The canvas slowly became saturated with equilibrium. The preconceived and pondered image, linear in its rationale, and which he must have sketched out in charcoal with rapid strokes, as was his custom, already stood out from the coloured patches that everywhere surrounded it. The landscape seemed to shimmer, for Cezanne had slowly circumscribed each object, sampling, so to speak, each tone.”
As Gasquet’s description indicates, painting...
