 Hi everybody, welcome to another barns takeout. My name is Kailin Jewel. I am Senior Instructor in Adult Education at the Barnes Foundation and today I want to spend a few minutes with a great painting that is in Gallery number two, which we see right now. Gallery two is a particularly popular room in the foundation for a lot of reasons. There's a lot of great paintings in there. There's a lot of great furniture. The metalwork is really fabulous, but probably the most popular painting in the room is Van Gogh's Postman, which you can see to the right of your screen in the corner. We heard about Van Gogh's Postman in a previous Barnes takeout, but today what I wanted to talk about is this painting to the left of center, a picture of a mountain. So let's zoom in a little bit and kind of take in the central part of the display. So as we've talked about in previous Barnes takeouts, the founder of the collection, Dr. Albert Barnes, put together these works of art in what he called ensembles and so this ensemble that we see in front of us is anchored by a large men a painting in the middle and on either side. We've got these two larger landscape pictures by the artist Paul Cezanne and with the way that Dr. Barnes was wanting to encourage his students and therefore us to look at these paintings or the furniture or the metalwork is that he wanted us to look at them in terms of their visual qualities. And so when you're in these galleries and some of you have probably done this before. Dr. Barnes would encourage us to find these visual similarities. So when we compare this picture on the right of a cityscape to a picture of a mountain and this landscape on the other side, we can see that they share a similar color palette. They are obviously by the same artist and there's an interesting connection in terms of this mountain shape, this sort of triangular shape of the top of the mountain is not totally unlike the top shape of the cityscape here with the apex with this bell tower in this picture of Gardin, a town in Provence. So let's look more closely at this painting here and it is a picture that here we've got a closer view of it. It was painted between 1892 and 1895 by Paul Cézanne. It is called Monsaint Victoire and it is a picture of one of Cézanne's favorite landscapes. So the artist Cézanne was from the town. It's not a town, the city of Exxon Provence, which is in southern France close to the Mediterranean coast and he utilized this landscape as one of his favorite subject matters over the course of his life and he painted somewhere around 60 maybe more than that pictures of this landscape, specifically focusing on this mountain that we see here, the mountain that is known as Monsaint Victoire. I want to show you a photograph of this landscape because I think it provides a sort of interesting comparison to the way that Cézanne has rendered it. So let's look at a photograph. So here's a picture showing you the landscape of this region and we can see here Monsaint Victoire in the background and you can see that there's some rolling foothills in the foreground and then we've got this area of farmland before that. Okay, if you zoom into this picture, one of this photograph I should say, one of the interesting aspects of this landscape and it's sort of hard to see but perhaps some of you have been there before. You can see here where the cursor is a little, a little, it looks like a little stick, a little vertical element on one of the points of the mountain and that is a large cross that was set up in the 1870s, around 1875 and it's so big as you can see that in this photograph that was taken at quite a distance, you can see it in the photograph. So let's return back to Cézanne's picture. You do not see that cross in the painting and I point that out because when we look at these landscapes by Cézanne, we are looking at a constructed reality. He is utilizing the landscape as a source of inspiration. It's the subject of his painting but when we start to notice how he is deviating from reality, he's doing so in a really interesting way. The painting is composed of a fairly simple color palette. We've got a lot of earth tones here and it's composed into a series of sort of spaces. We've got this foreground down here in the bottom which is filled with this kind of lovely sort of straw color that we can see and he's utilized these vertical brushstrokes. Let's zoom into this area right here so you can really see that. So we've got these very deliberately applied brushstrokes that are vertical and that first sort of screen of yellow overlaps a screen of green behind that is representative of plant life but he's sort of done this in a geometric way. Notice also this kind of mountain shape that has been depicted here. It's not unlike the mountain shape of the actual mountain in the background which is sort of looming over this landscape. If we move further into the scene into the landscape, we can travel backwards and so when we travel back, we're traveling into the painting. We're traveling into the three dimensional space that he has represented for us. We see this large tree or this large grove of trees here casting a shadow onto the farm land and you can see the red earth of the farmlands here. On the other side, we've got a sort of lower landscape. It's sort of it's more flat on the right side of the picture. If we move farther back, we start to get into those foothills that we saw in the photograph of the region of this part of France and we can see these foothills are starting to lead our eye towards the back towards this really emphatically rendered and carefully rendered outline and silhouette of the mountain. So let's look at the top and one of the great things about these images that we can zoom all the way in and we can start to see even some of Cezanne's under drawing for this picture. So this is oil on canvas, but if we look really closely, especially right here, you can see that he has utilized some sort of dark perhaps graphite, maybe a charcoal pencil. He has used here to kind of give an indication of portions of the kind of craggy mass of the mountain that he has then gone in and painted over, but he's left portions of the can the raw canvas visible to us and it's providing sort of a highlight area. We can see that over here as well. So he hasn't fully allowed the sky this kind of blue scumbling of the sky to meet the grays and pinks of the mountain. You can see there's a little bit of raw canvas here and again we can see that he's utilized this sort of outlines, which is really interesting and we can even see at the very top of the mountain that there is some space between the edge of the mountain and the sky and you can see that outline there. The sky sort of peaks in behind it. So let's zoom back out and look at the whole composition. So it's a picture that has great depth, but it also has a sort of remarkable sense of flatness and the flatness is created for us with these geometric elements that are representing little buildings and the landscape itself is taking place in a time that is not specific. We are not necessarily looking at an 1890s landscape. It could be an ancient landscape. We know that Cézanne himself was very interested in ancient authors and poets, people like Virgil, the first century, the great first century Roman poet, and even artists like Paul Gauguin referred to Cézanne as essentially getting lost in the mountains of Provence, reading Virgil. And so when he paints these landscapes, he paints them very often with a sense of that kind of ancient timelessness. And the last thing I want to mention with respect to that is the inclusion on the right side of the composition, this little bridge here. Let's zoom into that little bridge. And when we look at this, there's no indication as to what kind of bridge this is. It could be an ancient Roman aqueduct. We know that this region of Provence has the remains of aqueducts kind of scattered throughout the landscape. I mean, if you go there today, you can see little vestiges of this ancient Roman infrastructure present still in the landscape. But it also could be a train bridge. And that's probably what it is. If you go to this region, if you go to X today and you take the train from X to the coastal city of Marseille, the train goes across a bridge that looks very much like this. And so it's very likely that he is allowing us as viewers to question the age of this landscape. Is it modern? Is it ancient? Is it timeless? Is it unchanging? Or is it one that is changing? And so I think when we look at this picture and we think about it within the context of the foundation. So let's go back here and we'll end here. Looking at Montsaint Victoire in comparison to this picture that was painted not too long after the Montsaint Victoire. We see this picture of a town called Gardin, which was located on that train line between X and Marseille. Dr. Barnes by placing it in visual dialogue with Montsaint Victoire is creating a sort of Provençal landscape in Gallery 2, which is a real treat to kind of wander through. And then of course if we zoom out, as my colleague, Martha Lucy talked about with respect to Van Gogh's postman, Van Gogh's postman is one of those Provençal characters who lives in these types of landscapes. So Dr. Barnes perhaps is creating sort of a sense of that for us. So I've enjoyed wandering through the landscapes of Cezanne. There are a million ways to understand his pictures and this is the way that I like to think about it. Please join us again for another edition of Barnes Takeout and feel free to leave comments. We love to see what you guys have to say about these pictures. Thank you. Take care.