insight into “another facet of its meaning or character,” with the mountain assuming an abstract, elusive appeal. This period of paintings as a whole is crucial to understanding Cézanne’s later work. They display “powerful geometric reductiveness,” foreshadowing cubism and abstraction. Period of synthesis paintings Cézanne’s work during this period was filled with direct light and sharply outlined forms. These paintings were deeply “preconceived and pondered.” He tended to compose paintings in lines or bands across his canvases. In his landscapes, including the paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, Cézanne liked to modify and simplify the scenes. This broke the landscape norm of composing in planes in order to define depth. Cézanne’s landscapes also tended to have asymmetrical compositions, as well as broad and thick brushstrokes, to the point that he sometimes used the palette knife. The bulk of Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings during this period were from the mid-1880s on. Most of these works were executed with Cézanne situated east of Aix. He was particularly drawn to Mont Sainte-Victoire for its clarity and stark geometric form. In his works, Cézanne generally strove to unify rhythm, form, and color. His works became the most detailed from 1884-1888, and became more loose and “visionary” later on. Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings during this period generally displayed an extended profile of the mountain dominating the familiar valley. In some, a railroad bed cuts across the fields, with the arched viaduct crossing the middle ground. Houses and farm buildings dot the landscape. Many features “assume the weight of its history,” like the train trestle that transforms into an ancient aqueduct, resembling a Roman road. These features, as well as careful placement of the trees, allowed more fluid and intimate access to the mountain. A few paintings explore the relationship between the mountain, the single pine, the viaduct, and the ridge of Le Cengle. Cézanne climbed up and down the incline to test different views of this scene and these motifs. He enjoyed the interplay of the firmer planes of the landscape and mountain and the musicality of the trees. He would use structures, like the viaduct and arches, to introduce rhythm and pattern into the landscape. This rhythm gave the paintings a sense of unity and intention that is very different from Cézanne’s later paintings, making them more accessible than isolated. Cézanne often used a single pine as a framing device, like a curtain, which was generally