La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue des Lauves

La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue des Lauves, from around 1904 and held at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, is one of the monumental late Cézanne views of his most celebrated subject — the mountain southeast of Aix-en-Provence that he returned to throughout his career and obsessively in his final years from the Lauves studio he had built specifically for the purpose. The Sainte-Victoire series represents one of the most sustained single-subject investigations in the history of painting: a mountain repeatedly seen under different conditions until its geological and optical essence is laid bare. The Pushkin's late example shows the method at its most radical.

The late Lauves views push Cézanne's constructive colour method to its most abstract expression — the mountain resolved into broad planes of warm and cool colour patches that achieve structural clarity through purely chromatic means. The dissolution of conventional outline in favour of colour modulation anticipates Cubist simultaneity.