Paul Guillaume, Paris
Walther Halvorsen, Oslo (acquired from the above in 1916)
Acquired from the above

John Rewald writes that in his watercolors from the late 1880s, Cézanne "strove to establish a balance between his masterful, economic yet eloquent drawing and the equally ecomonic yet deft use of luminous spots of color... They represent, if not a radical departure from the conventional concept of the role of white paper in watercolors, at least a type of harmony to which the whiteness of the support is essential. Its all-embracing emptiness intensifies the mysterious relationship between a few firm lines and a few subtle color accents"(John Rewald, Les Aquarelles de Paul Cézanne, Catalogue raisonné, 1984, New York, p. 28).

This relationship between the white of the paper, the structural lines of the landscape and the soft spots of color that both emphasize the structure (as in the brown in the the branches at center) and slide across it (as in most of the green in the foreground) suggest Cézanne's depiction of the world taking shape as he sees it. Cézanne does not depict a fully-formed world, in other words, but one that takes form through his perception. Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that Cézanne "did not want to separate the stable things which we see and the shifting way in which they appear; he wanted to depict matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization" (Merleau-Ponty, "Cézanne's Doubt," Sense and Non-Sense, Evanston, 1964, p. 13).

Between 1880 and 1885, Cézanne spent much time working at his father's country residence in Aix-en-Provence, known as the "Jas de Bouffan". The present work is typical of his output 𒅌during this period and this particular landscape offers a remarkable glimpse of Cezanne's artistic processes.

Fig. I  Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1886-88, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gift of the Averell Harriman Foundation in♊ memory of Marie N. Harriman