Fig. 1: Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire and Large Pine, c. 1887.
What did Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) seek to realize in his paintings?
Cézanne was the first painter in the world to internalize the transformation of visual perception brought about by the advent of the steam railway in the nineteenth century and to translate it into pictorial form. This crucial fact has remained overlooked for more than a century.
Indeed, the period in which Cézanne grew up was an era marked by the rapid development of the railway in France.
In 1837, a passenger railway was introduced in France, and Cézanne was born two years later. The railway network expanded rapidly during the 1840s, and most of the main lines connecting Paris with France’s major cities were built under the Second French Empire (1852–1870).
In 1861, at the age of twenty-two, Cézanne took his first long-distance train journey—from his hometown of Aix-en-Provence to Paris. Thereafter, he continued to travel frequently by steam train between Aix and Paris well into his later years.
Although Cézanne is generally known as a painter devoted to nature, he was also a painter of modern life.
Fig. 2: Mont Sainte-Victoire and the railway bridge over the Arc Valley, seen from Montbriand.
(Photograph by the author, August 24, 2006.)
As long as movement depended on the horses’ strength and stamina, a horse-drawn carriage could average about 16 kilometers per hour. By contrast, steam locomotives in operation by 1845 could reach speeds of approximately 64 kilometers per hour—four times faster than a carriage.
Seen through the windows of a moving train, the swiftly passing scenery dissolved into fleeting, fragmentary images. This new mode of visual experience was often detested by the older generation, who were accustomed to a slower and more detailed appreciation of landscape.
The younger generation, however, soon learned to take pleasure in viewing the scenery through the windows of high-speed trains, and these transient images themselves came to be regarded as beautiful.
First, in a letter dated August 22, 1837, Victor Hugo wrote to his wife that he enjoyed watching the passing scenery from a moving train. He also remarked that the speed of the train made the scenery appear distorted, spotted and striped. He wrote:
I am reconciled with the railway; it is decidedly very beautiful… The movement is magnificent, and it is necessary to experience it in order to feel so. The speed is extraordinary. The flowers by the side of the road are no longer flowers but flecks, or rather streaks, of red or white; there are no longer any points, everything becomes a streak; the grain fields are great shocks of yellow hair; fields of alfalfa, long green tresses; the towns, the steeples, and the trees perform a crazy mingling dance on the horizon.[1]
Second, in English Items; or, Microcosmic Views of England and Englishmen (1853), Matthew Flournoy Ward likewise expressed his admiration for the fleeting images seen from a moving railway carriage. He observed that when viewed from an accelerating train, nearby objects seemed to move rapidly, while those in the distance appeared to move slowly. He wrote:
The beauties of England being those of a dream, should be as fleeting… They never appear so charming as when dashing on after a locomotive at forty miles (around 64 kilometers) an hour. Nothing by the way requires study, or demands meditation, and though objects immediately at hand seem tearing wildly by, yet the distant fields and scattered trees, are not so bent on eluding observation, but dwell long enough in the eye to leave their undying impression. Every thing is so quiet, so fresh, so full of home, and destitute of prominent objects to detain the eye, or distract the attention from the charming whole, that I love to dream through these placid beauties whilst sailing in the air, quick, as if astride a tornado.[2]
Cézanne was among the first to regard this new form of visual perception as beautiful, and it seems that he developed new modes of artistic expression influenced—whether consciously or unconsciously—by the experience of viewing scenery in motion from the railway. Indeed, in many of Cézanne’s paintings, his brushstrokes are repeatedly applied in a transverse direction, the ridgelines are emphasized horizontally, and the images of nearer objects appear rougher in form (Figs. 1–2).
Fig. 3: Mont Sainte-Victoire, seen from the train while crossing the railway bridge over the Arc Valley.
(Photograph by the author, August 26, 2006.)
In a letter to his friend Émile Zola (1840–1902), written on April 14, 1878, Cézanne praised the scenery seen from the window of a moving train:
When I went to Marseille I was in the company of Monsieur Gibert. These people see correctly, but they have the eyes of Professors. Where the train passes close to Alexis’s country house, a stunning motif appears on the East side: Ste Victoire and the rocks that dominate Beaurecueil. I said: ‘What a beautiful motif’; he replied: ‘The lines are swaying too much.’ With regard to L’Assommoir, about which, by the way, he spoke to me first, he said some very sensible and laudatory things, but always from the point of view of the technique![3]
Shortly after departing from Aix-en-Provence Station, the very landscape that Cézanne described comes into view through the window of the train bound for Marseille (Figs. 3–4). What Cézanne admired as “a beautiful motif” is, in fact, Mont Sainte-Victoire, which can be seen from the train as it crosses the railway bridge over the Arc Valley. The bridge itself is depicted at the center right of his painting (Fig. 1; Figs. 5–10).
Fig. 4: Mont Sainte-Victoire, seen from the train while crossing the railway bridge over the Arc Valley.
(Film by the author, August 26, 2006.)
Fig. 5: Mont Sainte-Victoire, seen from the railway bridge over the Arc Valley.
(Photograph by the author, August 22, 2006.)
Fig. 6: Railway bridge over the Arc Valley.
(Photograph by the author, August 22, 2006.)
Fig. 7: Railway bridge over the Arc Valley.
(Photograph by the author, August 22, 2006.)
Fig. 8: Railway bridge over the Arc Valley.
(Photograph by the author, August 22, 2006.)
Fig. 9: Railway bridge over the Arc Valley and Mont Sainte-Victoire.
(Film by the author, August 22, 2006.)
Fig. 10: Mont Sainte-Victoire seen beyond the railway bridge over the Arc Valley.
(Film by the author, August 25, 2006.)
Fig. 11: A train in the late 19th century.
(Photograph by Émile Zola.)
Fig. 12: Paul Cézanne at about 32 years old around 1871.
（Photographer unknown.）
It is noteworthy that Cézanne’s letter was written only six months after the opening of the railway line from Aix to Marseille—including the very bridge mentioned above—on October 15, 1877. Moreover, this letter represents the earliest known document in which the thirty-nine-year-old Cézanne referred to Mont Sainte-Victoire as a “motif,” and around 1878 he began his celebrated series of paintings devoted to the mountain.
It is highly probable that Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings were inspired by his visual experience as the train crossed the railway bridge over the Arc Valley. Cézanne declared that the scenery viewed from a moving train was beautiful, and such aesthetic sensation is reflected in his paintings in one way or another.
Of course, Cézanne did not sketch the exact scenery visible through the window of a moving train. Even so, from the perspective of assimilating modern vision into artistic creativity, it is important to recognize that Cézanne painted natural landscapes by applying a new mode of perception—one inspired by railway travel and retained even after he stepped off the train.
It is a historical fact that the railway, which became widespread in the nineteenth century, brought about a revolution in visual experience in everyday life. Although the scenery seen from moving trains is scarcely noticed today, the images that were entirely new to Cézanne were realized in his art. In conclusion, Cézanne played a strikingly significant role as a recorder of the transformation of visual perception in human history (Figs. 11–12).
[1] Victor Hugo, Correspondance familiale et écrits intimes, tome II (1828-1839), Paris: Robert Laffont, 1991, p. 421. (Cited in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986, p. 55.)
[2] Cited in Schivelbusch, op. cit., p. 60.
[3] Paul Cézanne, Letters, edited by John Rewald, translated from the French by Marguerite Kay, New York: Da Capo Press, 1995, pp. 158-159. (Cf. Paul Cézanne, Correspondance, recueillie, annotée et préfacée par John Rewald, Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1937; nouvelle édition révisée et augmentée, Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1978, p. 165.)
Fig. 11 is quoted from Émile Zola, Photograph, Eine Autobiographie in 480 Bildern, herausgegeben und zusammengestellt von François-Emile Zola und Massin, München: Schirmer/Mosel, 1979.
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