La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue des Lauves (Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les Lauves)

Painted in 1902 from his studio at Les Lauves — a hilltop property north of Aix that he purchased specifically for the elevated view of Mont Sainte-Victoire — this canvas belongs to the final, most abstract phase of Cézanne's mountain series. He had painted the mountain from multiple vantage points since the 1880s, but the Les Lauves views, with their greater distance and more expansive foreground of rooftops and vegetation, pushed his colour-based construction furthest toward dematerialisation. The Nelson-Atkins canvas is distinguished by a luminous blue-violet haze that dissolves the mountain's summit into atmosphere.

The foreground is built up with mosaic-like patches of green, ochre, and rose-orange across the valley plain, while the mountain itself is rendered in pale blue and violet planes that merge with sky. The horizon is deliberately ambiguous, with colour temperature rather than line marking the boundary between earth and air. The brushwork is open and gestural in the middle distance.