Mont Sainte-Victoire Painting Series. Mont Sainte-Victoire is a mountain in southern France, overlooking Aix-en-Provence.
   It became the subject of a number of Cézanne's paintings, in total numbering about thirty paintings and watercolors. Mont Sainte-Victoire became one of Cézanne’s most repeated and varied themes, with Cézanne changing something about the scene each time, from his angle to the lighting to the compositional specifics to the mood he tried to evoke.
   Cézanne used three primary vantage points for these paintings: near his brother’s property in Bellevue, near Bibemus quarry, and in Les Lauves. His scenes generally included Mont Sainte-Victoire itself, a grey-white limestone mountain, and the surrounding valley and plains that the mountain rose from.
   Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings fell into two main periods: those he executed during his so-called period of synthesis, from roughly the 1870s to 1895, and those he created during his late period, from around 1895 until his death in 1906. Through both periods, Cézanne painted in watercolor as well as oil paints to capture Mont Sainte-Victoire with more transparency and lightness.
   Only half a year after the opening of the Aix-Marseille train line on October 15, 1877, in a letter to Émile Zola dated April 14, 1878, Cézanne praised Mont Sainte-Victoire, which he viewed from the train while passing through the railway bridge at Arc River V
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