Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from Bellevue is a landscape painting dating from around 1886, by the French artist Paul Cézanne. The subject of the painting is the Montagne Sainte-Victoire in Provence in southern France. Cézanne spent a lot of time in Aix-en-Provence at the time, and developed a special relationship with the landscape. This particular mountain, that stood out in the surrounding landscape, he could see from his house, and he painted it in on numerous occasions.Becks-Malorny, p. 67.
Only half a year after the opening of the Aix–Marseille railway line on October 15, 1877, Cézanne wrote to his friend Émile Zola on April 14, 1878, praising Mont Sainte-Victoire—seen from the train as it crossed the Arc River Valley bridge—as a “beau motif” (“beautiful motif”).Paul Cézanne, Correspondance, recueillie, annotée et préfacée par John Rewald, nouvelle édition révisée et augmentée, Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1978, p. 165. Around this time, at the age of thirty-nine, Cézanne began, for the first time, a series of paintings devoted to Mont Sainte-Victoire in his native Aix-en-Provence. It is therefore highly probable that this celebrated series was inspired by the scenery viewed from the window of a moving train.Tomoki Akimaru, "Cézanne and the Railway (1): A Hidden Origin of Modern Vision", Art Critique+, AICA Japan, 6 September 2024.
Indeed, in this painting, the railway bridge on the Aix–Marseille line, which crosses the Arc River Valley, is depicted near the center-right of the composition.Tomoki Akimaru, “Cézanne and the Railway (3): His Railway Subject in Aix-en-Provence”, Art Critique+, AICA Japan, 6 September 2024.
The painting shows clearly Cézanne's project of rendering order and clarity to natural scenes, without giving up the optical realism of Impressionism.Gombrich, pp. 538-41. Both the light and the colours of the painting give the impression of a pattern that is not imposed on nature, but is there naturally.
See also List of paintings by Paul Cézanne
References
Sources Becks-Malorny, Ulrike Paul Cézanne, 1839-1906: Pioneer of Modernism (Cologne, 2001), Gombrich, E.H., The Story of Art, 16th ed. (London & New York, 1995), Tomoki Akimaru, "Cézanne and the Railway (1) – (7): A Transformation of Vision in the 19th Century", Art Critique+, AICA (Association Internationale des Critiques d'Art) Japan, 21 April 2025.