AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — Squinting into the sun, Olivier Sumeire pointed to where his vineyard stretches across the Vallée de l’Arc in the direction of Montagne Ste.-Victoire. The gray limestone mass looms beyond his children’s backyard play set, rising out of the olive trees and pines.
It happens that Cézanne painted nearly the same view. In 1870, in what has sometimes been interpreted as a protest against the proposed Aix-Rognac railway line that would have cut across his family’s property, not far from the Sumeire vineyard, he painted the mountain in the background and a kind of red gash in the landscape. Then in the 1880s he showed the rail line that connected Aix to Paris, dividing the valley, turning its arched trestle into an ancient aqueduct, as if to conjure up some Arcadian dream of unspoiled nature before modernity arrived.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/arts/design/14abroad.html?_r=1&hpw