Mont Sainte-Victoire

This 1903 Mont Sainte-Victoire at the Philadelphia Museum of Art belongs to the final phase of Cézanne's engagement with the mountain, when his handling had become more openly expressive and the formal architecture of the image more transparent. By 1903 Cézanne was in his mid-sixties, increasingly isolated in Aix, and working with a freedom from critical expectation that his early struggles had never allowed. The late mountain views — broader in gesture, more chromatic in their palette — were discovered by Picasso and Braque shortly after Cézanne's death in 1906 and became founding documents of Cubism.

Cézanne's brushwork in this late version is more open and gestural than in earlier treatments, with patches of bare canvas left untouched between strokes. The mountain's planes are constructed through modulated passages of blue, violet, and gray, while warm ochres and greens in the foreground advance and recede through colour temperature rather than linear perspective.