Garden at Bordighera, Impression of Morning

Garden at Bordighera, Impression of Morning is one of the canvases Claude Monet painted at Bordighera, on the Italian Riviera, between January and April 1884. Palm trees fan out against a pale, hazy morning sky, the ground below is a thicket of shrubs studded with yellow and orange flowers, and in the center, through the fronds, rises the bell tower of the town's old church. The painting came from the Otto Krebs collection and has been on view at the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg since 1995.

What you're looking at

The canvas is crowded with vegetation. Two large palms dominate: one at left, its trunk a pinkish-red column rising to a burst of fronds at the top, and another right of center, leaning slightly. Smaller palms and spiky plants fill the edges. Their fronds are painted in long, curving, feathery strokes of green, blue, ocher and pink, so they look almost transparent against the sky.

In the middle of the picture, framed by the two big palms, stands a pale cream bell tower with a domed top, the campanile of Bordighera's old-town church, glimpsed above the trees. The lower half of the canvas is a tangle of bushes in deep blues and greens, scattered with hundreds of small dabs of yellow, orange and red, flowering shrubs or citrus in fruit. The sky at the top is a soft, warm haze of pink, lilac and pale blue, the light of early morning before the sun burns through. The overall color is cooler in the lower half and warmer above.

Near the bottom, a few dark blue-black strokes mark the deepest shadow in the garden. Without them the flowers would have nothing to glow against.

Bordighera, 1884

Monet first saw the Riviera in December 1883 on a short trip with Pierre-Auguste Renoir. He came back alone in January 1884 and stayed in Bordighera until April, working on some fifty canvases. He was overwhelmed by the light and color. He wrote to the critic Théodore Duret that he had set himself up in a fairyland and that he would need a palette of diamonds and precious stones.

Many of his Bordighera pictures are views into private gardens, notably that of the Villa Moreno, with its famous palms. Related canvases include Palm Trees at Bordighera at the Met, Bordighera in Chicago, Villas in Bordighera in Santa Barbara and Villas at Bordighera in the Musée d'Orsay. Inland he painted the very different Valley of the Nervia. His Riviera trips are gathered on Monet on the Mediterranean.

How it was painted

The canvas is a standard size, about 65 by 81 centimeters. Monet's touch here is denser and more varied than in his work of the 1870s. Palm fronds are drawn with long, whipping strokes; shrubs with short, stabbing ones; flowers with round dabs; and the sky with a soft, scumbled layer. The surface becomes a woven texture of color, with very little empty space. The subtitle, impression of morning, recalls his earlier Impression, Sunrise. It signals that the subject is a particular light and time of day, not a topographical record of the garden.

The Bordighera trip marked a turn in Monet's color. Brighter, more saturated pinks, blues and oranges entered his palette, and they returned in his 1888 pictures at Antibes and in later Giverny work.

From Otto Krebs to the Hermitage

The painting was in the collection of Otto Krebs, a German industrialist whose French paintings were kept at his estate in Thuringia. In 1945 it was taken by the Red Army to the Soviet Union and stored secretly in Leningrad for fifty years. It was first exhibited in the Hermitage's 1995 show of French paintings from German private collections and remains in the museum, along with The Seine at Rouen and The Grand Quai at Le Havre from the same source. For other places to see Monet's paintings, see where to see Monet's paintings.