La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue du bosquet du Château Noir is a 1904 oil on canvas landscape painting by the French artist Paul Cézanne. The ostensible subject is the painter's familiar Montagne Sainte-Victoire and it is part of a series the artist did of the promontory between 1904 and 1906.
Only half a year after the opening of the Aix–Marseille railway line on 15 October 1877, Cézanne wrote to his friend Émile Zola on 14 April 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.
In 2014 the work was sold by the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House in Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan for US$100 million in a private sale to the State of Qatar.
See also List of paintings by Paul Cézanne List of most expensive paintings
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