Morning at Antibes

Claude Monet's Morning at Antibes (Matin à Antibes) was painted in the spring of 1888, during his stay on the Côte d'Azur. A tall, airy tree on the near shore fills the right half of the canvas, while the old town of Antibes lies far across the water, pale and weightless in the morning haze. The canvas, 65.7 by 82.1 centimeters (Wildenstein 1170), is signed at lower right. It is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the bequest of Charlotte Dorrance Wright in 1978.

What you are looking at

The tree is the real subject. It rises from a reddish bank at lower right, its trunk forking into several pale, rosy limbs that spread across the top of the canvas. Its foliage is not a solid mass but a delicate, transparent cloud of strokes in lilac, pale blue, cream and yellow-green, through which you see the sky. On the left edge, a second, smaller tree in blue-green frames the view, so that the town sits in a gap between them.

Across the water, Antibes is a thin band of pinks and creams on the horizon, with its two towers just visible. Behind it rises a soft, rosy haze where the mountains should be; Monet hints at them only as a faint pink glow. The sea in the lower third is a flat, calm sheet of pale green and turquoise, painted with short horizontal strokes. The sky is a high, pale blue that turns almost white near the horizon.

The overall effect is of thin morning air before the heat of the day: no hard shadows, no strong contrasts, everything softened. The tree's colors, pink, lilac and gold, are the colors of early light, not of its own leaves.

Where and when

Monet spent January to May 1888 at Antibes, lodging at the Château de la Pinède and painting some thirty-nine compositions. He picked a few motifs and returned to them under different light, an approach that would lead directly to the Haystacks two years later. The old town seen across the bay, with the Alps behind, was one of his main subjects, and he painted it at several times of day: this canvas, as its title says, records the early morning.

How this version differs

In The Fort of Antibes, now in the Hasso Plattner Collection, the town is the hero, seen frontally in strong light with snowy mountains behind. Here it is reduced to a whisper on the horizon, and a single tree takes over the composition. The same device, a tree in the foreground against sea and mountains, appears in the Courtauld's Antibes, where a lone pine leans across the view, and the town reappears as a distant accent behind a cottage in Gardener's House at Antibes.

The tree-against-the-view composition owes something to the Japanese prints Monet collected, in which a branch or trunk in the foreground often frames a distant landscape. What distinguishes the Philadelphia picture is its softness: of all the Antibes canvases, it is one of the palest and most atmospheric.

How it was painted

The foliage is built of thousands of small, separate touches of color, laid over and around each other, with the sky showing through. The trunk and branches are painted in long, fluid strokes of pink, red-brown and violet. The sea is smoother and more regular. The palette is high-keyed throughout, with almost no dark values; even the shadowed side of the tree is lilac and blue rather than brown. The result is a surface that seems to vibrate with light.

For Monet's southern campaigns at Bordighera and Antibes, see Monet on the Mediterranean, and compare the evening mood of Under the Pines, Evening, also in Philadelphia.

Where to see it

The painting came to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1978 as the bequest of Charlotte Dorrance Wright. The museum also holds Monet's Manne-Porte, Étretat and Bend in the Epte River near Giverny; display varies. See Where to See Monet's Paintings and Claude Monet.