Gardener's House at Antibes

Claude Monet's Gardener's House at Antibes (Maison de jardinier à Antibes) was painted in the spring of 1888, during his four-month stay on the Riviera. It shows a low cottage under a sloping roof, half hidden by slender trees just coming into leaf, with the sea and the distant towers of Antibes beyond. The canvas, 66.3 by 93 centimeters (Wildenstein 1165), is signed at lower right. It has been in the Cleveland Museum of Art since 1916.

What you are looking at

The foreground is a screen of young trees, their pale, silvery trunks and branches spreading across the canvas like a net. Their leaves are just opening, painted as small flicks of yellow-green and lime, and the Cleveland museum reads them, rightly, as a sign of early spring. At the left a taller tree rises almost to the top edge, its branches thin and wiry.

Behind the trees sits the gardener's house, a long, low building with walls of rose, peach and lilac and a roof of glowing coral and orange tiles. A stubby chimney pokes up at center. The right end of the house is in shade, painted in cool blues and violets, with a small red window. At the lower edge, a strip of bright green grass and a few pink and orange touches suggest a garden bed.

Over the roof you glimpse the Mediterranean, a band of deep blue, and on it, at left, the two square towers of old Antibes, tiny and pale. Behind them, the mountains dissolve in haze. The sky is a soft, streaky blue, washed with pink and white clouds.

The detail to look for is the way the branches cross the roof. Monet paints the twigs over the coral tiles in pale blue and white, so that the house seems seen through lace.

Where and when

Monet stayed at Antibes from January to May 1888, at the Château de la Pinède, a lodging for artists. Despite gusts of wind that, as the museum notes, threatened to knock over his easel, he completed nearly forty canvases. He moved between a handful of motifs: the old town across the bay, pines along the shore, the mountains, and modest garden scenes like this one, where the town appears only as a distant accent.

How this version differs

The old town of Antibes is the hero of The Fort of Antibes and appears again, a pale strip far across the water beside a feathery tree, in Morning at Antibes. Here it shrinks to a pair of pale towers glimpsed between branches, and the subject becomes the house, the trees and the season. It is the most domestic of the Antibes pictures and the one in which spring is most visible: compare the lone, leaning pine of the Courtauld's Antibes or the darkening grove of Under the Pines, Evening.

The Cleveland museum describes the canvas as especially vibrant, and the reason is the color: coral roof against blue sea, yellow-green leaves against blue sky, violet shadow against warm pink wall. Monet sets complementary pairs side by side across the whole surface.

How it was painted

The paint is applied thickly, in small, crisp strokes that stand up from the canvas. On the roof they run in short horizontal rows that follow the lines of the tiles; on the walls they are vertical; on the trees they are tiny, separate dabs for the leaves and long, thin strokes for the branches. The thick impasto catches real light in the gallery, adding to the sense of midday sun. Very little of the canvas is left bare, unlike some of Monet's quicker sketches.

For all of Monet's southern work, see Monet on the Mediterranean.

Ownership and where to see it

Durand-Ruel bought the painting from Monet in July 1891. It crossed to New York, was sold in 1892 to the railway magnate William Van Horne of Montreal, who returned it, then to a St. Louis collector, and finally, in March 1893, to the Cleveland industrialist Jeptha H. Wade. Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Wade gave it to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1916, the year the museum opened. See Where to See Monet's Paintings and Claude Monet.