Date: 15-08-2004
Owning Institution: The Courtauld Galleries
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”        
Subject: 19th Century    20th Century      

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 a picture was an extremely laborious and intellectually demanding experience for Cezanne. He was influenced by the Impressionists, but suspicious that their declared aim of catching nature on the move might result in a merely ephemeral form of painting. His ambition was to paint pictures that would express the ever-changing nature of experience, but which would also possess a monumental grandeur. He expressed this in a number of different ways. “I have wanted to make Impressionism as solid and durable as the art in the Galleries,” he said on one occasion; on another, that “One must return to Classicism, but through Nature, that is to say through sensation.”

Seen close to, the Courtauld’s Mountain Sainte-Victoire has the tremulous, almost hesitant quality of a sketch. In some places the cream priming of the canvas has been left bare by the artist, and many traces of his extensive underdrawing – executed with the fine point of a brush, in Prussian Blue – have also been left visible. The traces of the artist’s struggle to represent what he sees, even as he looks at it, have been allowed to persist, like the residue of the very act of perception. Cezanne suggests distance by his own, slightly idiosyncratic use of aerial perspective, duplicating the effect in nature whereby far objects become blued by distance.

The artist’s sense of light as an active entity in nature, constantly modifying the appearance of objects, is implied in the subtle weave of of colours that he has threaded through the whole of his landscape. The greens and yellows of the foreground become softer blues and pinks on the distant mountain itself – but these blues and pinks colour parts of the foreground too, and are especially visible in the silhouetted, horizontal branch of the cypress tree that frames the composition as a whole. The strokes that delineate that tree, and some of the buildings in the landscape, are subtly doubled – another of Cezanne’s way of suggesting the truancies of vision, the way that the things that we see, thanks to the motion of our own bodies, or the movement of the wind, are never still.

Yet he has also wrestled his own mutable, volatile perceptions into a majestic pictorial structure. The framing device of the cypress tree recalls – as it was surely meant to – the compositions of the great classical French landscape painters of the seventeenth century, Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin. Likewise, the buildings in the landscape, and the railway viaduct in the middle distance, have been geometrically simplified to the point where they, too, seem to carry classical associations. They could be Roman remains, a Roman viaduct. The  passage of time is suggested by such details. Behind all of this the mountain rises into the distance, a symbol of permanence rising above a world of change and an an apt symbol, too, of Cezanne’s own greatest ambition – to give ephemeral experience a lasting, monumental form.