The Mont Sainte-Victoire dominates all the countryside around Aix like a huge marble pyramid. The people of the region foretell the weather by the way it looks and have certain superstitions about it. Cezanne painted it over and over again, and at the end of his life it had become almost his only model.
In this perfect example of his art, the mountain is partly hidden by trees and takes its place with the other forms in the landscape. The shrubbery and the trees in the foreground, and the wall of mountains and hills in the distance, create between them a crystal-clear body of space in the center, the quality of which emphasized by the pale blue sky.
The color shows Cezanne’s complete mastery of landscape painting, ranging, always with incredible variety, from the brightest greens to the pale blue-pink in the distance, and always composed in order to keep the unity of the picture. The drawing is of the utmost simplicity: tree trunks are almost cylinder, foliage is made up by brush strokes in abstract shapes which nevertheless are completely convincing in their suggestion of nature.
