Mont Sainte-Victoire, the mountain that looms over the countryside surrounding Aix-en-Provence, is emblematic of Cézanne’s oeuvre, representing not only the artist’s attachment to his native landscape but also his practice of returning to the same motif repeatedly.

When the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote about the 1907 exhibition of Cézanne’s watercolors in Paris, he might well have been describing this work: "very light pencil outlines, and here and there, as if just for emphasis and confirmation, there’s an accidental scattering of color, a row of spots, wonderfully arranged and with a security of touch; as if mirroring a melody."