Personal Apperception: Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, and Paul Cézanne's: La Montagne Sainte-Victoire

This paper examines Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett's respective engagements with Paul Cézanne's late landscapes; specifically those from his late La Montagne Saint-Victoire watercolour series. Placing their respective engagements with the Mont Sainte-Victoire landscapes side-by-side and in the context of their literary aesthetics, I argue that Beckett's admiration of Cézanne's work, as expressed in 1934, can be aligned with, and seen as an aesthetic antecedent to, his comments on Stein in the 1937 letter to Axel Kaun.