La Montagne Sainte-Victoire

For this delicate watercolour, Cézanne selected a view of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire similar to that he had chosen for the oil painting in The Courtauld Gallery’s collection. Unlike the canvas, which is formed by a rich build-up of planes of saturated colour, the watercolour features large, unworked passages made three-dimensional through Cézanne’s minimal but descriptive pencil lines and delicate hues. Cézanne’s deep familiarity with the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, which he saw as a symbol of his native Provence and was a source of inspiration throughout his life, allowed him to capture the essence of the mountain with exceptional economy of treatment. The face of the mountain has been scarcely modelled with sparse pencil lines, loose hatching and patches of pale blue watercolour. The foothills and the foreground vegetation have been more intensely worked with subtle and restrained touches of greens, blues, yellows and oranges that have slowly been built up in successive layers. Specific landmarks, such as houses and trees, have been left as mere suggestions; the horizontal strip of blue to the right of the composition may refer to the viaduct that is clearly modelled in the Courtauld oil painting. Colour is used to organise this balanced and serene view of the mountain, with highly saturated warm tones used in the foreground graduating to diluted, cool colours in the distance, while dashes of yellow unite the composition. Though he experimented with the medium early on, Cézanne began to work more seriously in watercolour from the mid 1880s and produced more than 650 watercolours over the course of his career. Some served as direct studies for oil paintings while others were executed as independent works.