Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir

Rising in the distance is Mont Sainte-Victoire, a mountain in southern France that Paul Cézanne could not stop painting. He grew up near it and spent his final years returning to the same view dozens of times, chasing something he could never quite pin down. The golden building peeking through the trees is the Château Noir, an estate he loved so much that he tried to buy it. The sale never happened, but he rented space there to keep his supplies and work close by.

Made in 1904, near the end of his life, the whole scene is built from small blocks of color set side by side, almost like patches sewn together. Cézanne was not after an exact copy of the landscape. He wanted to reveal the solid shapes hiding beneath what our eyes see, once saying he aimed to treat nature "by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone." Patches of bare canvas peek through here and there, and the picture feels loose, even unfinished in spots, but that was simply his way of working. Younger painters took notice, and this blocky, structural approach helped point Picasso and the Cubists toward what came next.