Bordighera

Claude Monet's Bordighera was painted in early 1884 at the Italian seaside town of Bordighera, near the French border, during a working trip that was meant to last three weeks and stretched to nearly three months. The canvas, 65 by 80.8 centimeters and number 854 in Wildenstein's catalogue, is in the Art Institute of Chicago, which received it in 1922 with the Potter Palmer Collection.

What you are looking at

The picture is a screen of trees. Maritime pines grow out of the scrub on the hillside where Monet set up his easel, and their trunks twist and fork in snaking S-curves, painted pale pink, cream and gray where the sun strikes the bark. One trunk runs almost the whole width of the canvas, climbing from the lower left and splitting into two thin limbs at the center. The foliage, a mass of short olive, bottle-green, gold and blue strokes, fills the top half and spills down the right side.

Through the gaps the view opens in two directions. In the middle distance sits the old hill town of Bordighera, a cluster of sunlit ocher and pink buildings with a bell tower rising out of it. Behind it the Mediterranean stretches to the horizon in an intense ultramarine band, under a pale sky. The eye has to work its way through the branches to reach the town, a little like peering through a lattice. Monet signed the canvas at lower left.

How it was painted

Monet found the southern light exhausting. In a letter to the sculptor Auguste Rodin he described himself as fencing and wrestling with the sun, and he told Alice Hoschedé that he needed colors of a brightness he had never dared before. His Bordighera canvases are among the most saturated of his career. Here the blue of the sea is put down almost unmixed, and the shadows in the foliage are blue and violet rather than dark green.

The trunks are almost decorative, their rhythm closer to the Japanese prints Monet collected than to anything in his Normandy work. They also solve a problem he complained about in his letters: in a landscape of such abundant vegetation he found it hard to find a motif. By making the trees the motif and the town the background, he turns the tangle into a structure. The paint is laid in quick, separate touches everywhere, from the scrub at the bottom to the strip of sea.

The trip to Bordighera

Monet first saw the Riviera in December 1883 on a short trip with Pierre-Auguste Renoir. He went back alone in January 1884, deliberately without Renoir, because he wanted to concentrate, and he stayed until April. He painted the palms, olive groves and gardens of the town, including the famous garden of the Moreno family, and walked inland to the valley of the Nervia. The results include Palm Trees at Bordighera in the Metropolitan Museum, Villas at Bordighera in the Musée d'Orsay and The Valley of the Nervia. His dealer Paul Durand-Ruel showed them in Paris, and they helped establish Monet as a painter of light in every climate.

Four years later he went south again, to Antibes, and painted the calmer, paler Antibes, now in the Courtauld. Our hub on Monet on the Mediterranean gathers both campaigns.

Why it matters

The Bordighera trip came at a turning point. Monet had settled at Giverny in 1883 and was beginning to travel in search of strong motifs: the Normandy cliffs, Belle-Île, the Riviera. Each campaign pushed his color further from what he had used at Argenteuil. The heightened palette of Bordighera fed directly into the series of the 1890s. For a sense of how different the northern coast looked in the same decade, compare Boats on the Beach at Étretat of 1885.

Where to see it

Bordighera is part of the Potter Palmer Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. Bertha Honoré Palmer, a Chicago collector who bought heavily from Durand-Ruel in the 1890s, was one of the first great American buyers of Monet, and her gift is the reason Chicago owns so many of his pictures. It is usually on view in the Impressionist galleries. More on Claude Monet.