Montagne Sainte-Victoire (Paysage)

Montagne Sainte-Victoire (Paysage), 1889, was painted the year Cézanne was beginning his systematic series of canvases devoted to the same Provençal mountain near Aix — the series that would eventually produce some of the most famous landscapes in modern art. Renoir and Cézanne had a complex friendship: they had painted together at L'Estaque in 1882, where Cézanne's structural approach to landscape had influenced Renoir's own post-Impressionist transition, and the two painters remained in contact throughout the 1880s. Renoir's Sainte-Victoire uses the same mountain Cézanne was treating as a vehicle for structural analysis, but approaches it as an occasion for atmospheric warmth and sensory pleasure — the heat haze over the Provençal limestone, the blue shadows in the mountain's crevices, the golden scrubland of the Aix basin in late afternoon. The comparison between their two treatments of the same subject is one of the most revealing in French art: the same mountain producing diametrically opposed artistic responses.

Renoir treats the mountain with loose, warm brushwork rather than Cézanne's planar construction, conveying the heat-haze and luminosity of the Provençal landscape through chromatic warmth. Blues and purples in the mountain shadow contrast with golden ochres in the foreground scrubland.