La Montagne Sainte Victoire FWN 258 1889 65 cm x 81
La Montagne Sainte Victoire Renoir 1889
I love the tapestry of interwoven colours in Cezanne’s painting of the famous mountain; it just calls me to stop and engage: an invitation to sit, don’t analyze, just be still with the mountain, be grounded on the undulating earth, and be whole. Have a cup of tea, chill out and let your spirit be free for a while, with the mountain.
Drink your tea slowly and reverently,
as if it is the axis
on which the world earth revolves…
Okay; let’s try and see how Cezanne does it. Well, where is your focus of attention in Cezanne’s painting? Mine is straight down the middle, up to the top of the mountain. And Renoir’s? – maybe the guy with the crisp white shirt in the foreground left…..
Even though it’s late in the period of Cezanne’s constructivist phase, I thought I’d present this painting of Saint Victoire mountain because Renoir painted the same mountain from the same spot – indeed these two friends painted them together. Renoir visited Cezanne, but came down with pneumonia and was bed-bound for a couple of weeks. Cezanne nursed him back to health, and then out they went to paint together: and these two paintings are the results. They are particularly interesting because they display how Cezanne’s painting was diverging from the Impressionists. The Impressionists to be sure, painted with emotion and joie de vivre; they painted the simple things: the beauty and texture of nature shimmering in the sunshine of Provence or Paris, in bright vibrant colours. But they retained the formal organization of the mechanics of their art, they retained the methodology that they had been taught at school of how to do it! Cezanne wanted to retain the emotion, joie de vivre, shimmering colours, but create a solidity out of a new organizing method, without the use of traditional perspective.
Erle Loran, American Art Historian, lecturer and painter (RIP 1999), who lived in Cezanne’s studio while doing his research, uses the diagrams below to show the difference between Cezanne’s painting, and Renoir’s.
Drawing in perspective means that you adjust the objects painted to align with an imaginary line from two fixed points – the viewer, and a point on the horizon. Everything in between has to be in alignment with that line for it to look ‘right’ – for Renoir, the imaginary line runs from where he is standing to the end point on the horizon. It makes it look more distant. Cezanne does not paint with perspective; and has to find other means of presenting the scene – foreshortening the foreground, not fading the mountain but instead making it more defined and making it fill more picture space: it makes it look more solid.
The movement of Renoir’s rendition of the motif, using traditional perspective, seems to go off in the line of the two arrows in diagram II, below; where-as the movement in Cezanne’s rendition goes around the mountain and back, in the direction of the three arrows of the top diagram I.
Let’s return to Cezanne’s Mountain of Sainte Victoire: for me, its solidity is achieved because the movement of the painting is around and within the enclosed space of the picture box: it is complete unto itself.
It is an invitation into presence,
deeply simple,
inclusive, rounded and realized,
colourful, joyful and powerful,
simply deep presence.
Drink your tea slowly and reverently,
as if it is the axis
on which the world earth revolves
– slowly, evenly, without
rushing toward the future;
Live the actual moment.
Only this moment is life.
Thich Nhat Hanh
