Mount Sainte-Victoire

Cézanne lived at the same time with artists-Impressionists, and participated in the first and third exhibitions organized by the "Anonymous society of painters, sculptors and engravers", he went in the open air along with Pissarro and get rid of the dark colors under its influence. But that landscape – the one artistic genre, in which cézanne was the most neoimpressionist artist of his time. And it's not in the palette and not in the technique.

Cézanne couldn't stand theories of art – it's like he was always afraid of accidentally get caught up in one anothers slender worldview. In the last 20 years of life, reducing communication with artists, writers and family almost to epistolary, he happily closed in a small Studio and started looking for his "promised land". In the paintings of the Impressionists who tried to catch the momentary and temporary, Cezanne did not see the monumentality and philosophical thoroughness, which will these pictures ever be on the walls of the Louvre. No, he had long been dreaming about fame and the Louvre – it is just painful wants to perform several important tasks: to give a sense of the beauty of places, so close to wonderful and exciting for him personally to convey only its own emotions and feelings from the sight and to see the image from all the excess and reveal through him the logic of nature, to find the timeless, the eternal – something that is present in the paintings of the old masters.

And leaving daily, dozens of times, from morning till evening to write the Montagne Sainte-Victoire from different angles, he's not looking for the nuances of lighting at different times of day and year, he is looking for the essence of the mountains. He began to write immediately, spends hours in silence staring at the landscape while it has not come to a vision of the future picture. He does a lot of watercolor and pastel sketches, lays one picture and takes another, stretching the work over them for a few years. Gradually, the image of the mountain becoming more concise and sometimes almost abstract.

This painting cézanne showed his countrymen in the exhibition, arranged in AIX in 1895, the Society of Amateur artists. They have long started to think that maybe cézanne is not just a crazy actor and it is worth a look, decided in the end to try. Already not waiting for recognition to the artist that proposal was very flattered. He sent to the exhibition two of his paintings, to see a bold and progressive artists and fans soon forgot about the desire to be bold and to understand Cezanne, they hung the paintings higher up, above the entrance door to the eye not much is rushed. The only person who expressed the artist's delight "Mount Sainte-Victoire" was the son of a local grocer Joachim Gasquet, an aspiring poet, later wrote a book about Cezanne. Moved by Paul gave the young Joachim picture.

Author: Anna Sidelnikova