Antibes

Claude Monet's Antibes, often listed as Cap d'Antibes, was painted in the spring of 1888 during a four-month stay on the French Riviera. The canvas, 65.5 by 92.4 centimeters and number 1192 in Wildenstein's catalogue, is in the Courtauld Gallery in London.

What you are looking at

A single maritime pine grows from a low rocky bank at the bottom of the picture, a little left of center, and leans out across the view. Its trunk bends in a slow S-curve, thin and dark, before the crown spreads in a broad, wind-shaped canopy that fills the top of the canvas and reaches almost to the right edge. That one tree organizes the whole composition: it splits the sea and sky into two unequal halves and sets the dark green of its needles against the pale air.

Behind it the sea fills the middle band in short horizontal strokes of turquoise, cobalt and lilac, with a few warm brown rocks breaking the surface near the shore. Across the water a range of mountains runs along the horizon in soft pink and violet, the color distant rock takes on in strong haze, and a thin line of white marks the far shore at its foot. The sky is streaked with cream, pale blue and lilac. The foreground bank is a strip of ochre and rust, with a dark clump of shrubs at the lower left.

How it was painted

The surface is dense and evenly worked. Monet builds the sea from thousands of small, flat touches laid side by side, so the water shimmers without any single wave being drawn. The sky is done with longer, thinner strokes that let the pale ground show through. The pine's foliage is the boldest passage: short, ragged dabs of dark green and blue-black, with sky color left between them so the crown looks airy rather than solid.

The palette is high and pastel, and Monet keeps contrasts low everywhere except in the tree. The result is the soft, pearly light of a Mediterranean spring, quite different from the fierce saturation he had chased at Bordighera four years earlier.

Japanese prints and the Riviera

The single tree cutting across the view, placed off-center and cropped by the frame, recalls the Japanese woodblock prints Monet collected, especially the landscapes of Hokusai and Hiroshige, where a pine often frames a mountain or a bay. In the south Monet used these devices with new confidence. Several other Antibes canvases repeat the arrangement with the tree seen from slightly different positions, and the series-like repetition of a motif under changing light points toward the Haystacks he would begin two years later.

Monet at Antibes

Monet arrived at Antibes in January 1888 and stayed until early May, lodging at the Château de la Pinède, a residence that took in artists. He worked on dozens of canvases, complaining in letters about the difficulty of the light and the changing weather. The soft light he chased here is the opposite of the stormy Atlantic pictures of Belle-Île he had made in 1886, such as The Rocks of Belle-Île, with their black rocks and churning surf.

That summer ten of the Antibes pictures were shown in Paris at Boussod, Valadon & Cie, where Theo van Gogh, Vincent's brother, ran the modern department. The show sold well and helped confirm Monet's growing reputation, at the moment Theo's brother Vincent was in Arles painting his own southern light. For both of his southern campaigns, see our hub on Monet on the Mediterranean, which also covers Palm Trees at Bordighera and Villas at Bordighera.

Where to see it

The painting belongs to the Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House, London, and came to it in 1948 with the bequest of Samuel Courtauld, the textile industrialist who formed one of Britain's finest Impressionist collections. The same gallery holds Monet's Vase of Flowers. For other collections worldwide, see where to see Monet's paintings. More on Claude Monet.