Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir

Paul Cézanne's 'Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir' (1904) belongs to his final series of the mountain that had been his primary subject for three decades — the Château Noir, an unfinished nineteenth-century building in the forested hillside northeast of Aix-en-Provence, appears in several of his late compositions alongside the mountain. By 1904, Cézanne was producing his most radical late work — the paintings of this period showed increasing freedom from conventional spatial representation and an intensity of formal investigation that pointed directly toward Cubism.

Cézanne renders the mountain and château with the systematic planar approach of his late style — the forms broken into planes of color that built the landscape through tonal and chromatic relationships rather than conventional perspective and modeling. His brushwork in the late Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings is characteristically open, leaving areas of the canvas bare, the white support contributing to the luminous quality. The relationship between the architectural forms of the château and the natural forms of the mountain creates the composition's formal investigation.