Paul Cézanne, La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, 1897; oil on canvas. © Kunstmuseum Bern, Legs Cornelius Gurlitt, 2014

To paint a landscape is nearly impossible. In any vista, the accumulation of life is manifold and growing. To paint a tree is to fix a being that is in motion, changing with the light and the wind riffling through the branches, moment by moment. The painter has to stop all of that, translating this vivacity onto a flat canvas, presenting as fact the fiction that the natural world holds still even for an instant.

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Bonnard painted landscapes indoors, Matisse through windows and Picasso rarely attempted them. Van Gogh went outside to paint in the fields, trying to capture the changing light and vibrations of color as if he were hearing the light’s waves as sound. Cézanne said, “The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.” Indeed, his landscapes don’t look like observations, like the Hudson River School painters who endeavored to capture the epic quality of mountains and sky. Indeed not; Cézanne paints close in, as if he were jumping into the quarry or apples, swallowing their essence and resurfacing as that thing. No wonder he was considered antisocial.

Emile Bernard, his childhood friend and fellow painter, said that Cézanne “had no conception of beauty.” How could he if he was in each case the thing he was painting, not outside looking in but imbibing from within? The Mont Saint-Victoires that he paints over and over is never realistic, even though they are recognizable as that mountain. They are clusters of received impressions that came to him with weight and import. He received the world through painting, drawing every day and painting en plein air the day he died. In his life, he made some 900 paintings.