Strada Romana in Bordighera

Claude Monet's Strada Romana in Bordighera was painted on the spot in early 1884, during his three-month stay on the Italian Riviera. It shows the old Roman road above the town, lined with winter villas, on an empty afternoon. The canvas, 66 by 81.5 centimeters, is signed and dated "84 Claude Monet" at lower right and catalogued by Wildenstein as number 855. It belongs to the Hasso Plattner Collection at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam.

What you are looking at

A pale, sandy road curves in from the lower left and disappears into the middle distance between banks of vegetation. Nobody walks on it. The road is painted in creams and lilacs, with soft blue shadows thrown across it from the trees, and it gives the picture its one clear line of movement.

To the right, a great mound of shrubs and flowers fills the center and foreground: greens and yellow-greens dotted with pink, red, orange and white blossom. Out of it rises a tall date palm, its trunk a thin column and its crown a spray of yellow and ocher fronds. At the far right edge, a pale villa with arched windows and a red roof is half hidden by a second palm; on the left, behind a dark green tree, the red roofs of two more villas catch the sun. Behind everything the mountains rise in a soft wall of pink, violet and blue, glowing in the haze.

The Barberini identifies the two villas: the Villa Goffin on the right and the Casa Rossa on the left. Both are largely buried in greenery. Monet was not interested in the architecture as a sight, but in the way southern light sat on plaster, leaves and hills at the same moment.

Where and when

Monet arrived at Bordighera in January 1884, having seen the town only briefly with Renoir the month before. He meant to stay a few weeks and stayed three months. Used to the cool tones of Normandy, he found the southern light both a pleasure and a problem, and he worked through the landscape methodically before he started painting. Two weeks in, he wrote to Alice Hoschedé that he was making progress and was now venturing into pinks and blues, the exact palette of the mountains in this picture. In a letter to the critic Théodore Duret he called the region a magical land.

How this version differs

The Barberini picture is one of three views of the Strada Romana and its villas. Monet painted it out of doors, like Villas in Bordighera in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. A later version of the same street, painted from memory at Giverny for Berthe Morisot, is in the Musée d'Orsay as Villas at Bordighera. Comparing them shows the difference between a picture worked in front of the motif, with its loose, sun-bleached handling, and a version made later from memory and earlier canvases.

What sets this version apart is its emptiness and its time of day. The road is deserted, and the light is the flat, warm light of early afternoon, with short shadows and a haze over the mountains. It is a portrait of heat and stillness rather than of a place.

How it was painted

The paint is thin in the sky and mountains, where the weave of the canvas shows through, and thicker in the vegetation, where Monet builds up short curling strokes of saturated color. Pinks and blues recur everywhere, in the mountains, the road shadows, the flowers and the villa walls, so that the whole surface hangs together as a single color chord. The palm crown is done in a handful of quick, dry strokes of yellow over blue sky.

The same campaign produced Villas at Bordighera, also in the Plattner collection, and the town views View of Bordighera and Bordighera. For all the southern pictures, see Monet on the Mediterranean.

Ownership and where to see it

Durand-Ruel had the painting by June 1884, probably directly from Monet, and it passed through the Paris dealers Georges Petit and Bernheim-Jeune before crossing to America, where it belonged for decades to collectors in Cincinnati and then Chicago. It sold at Christie's New York in 2008, was in the Nahmad Collection by 2012, and was acquired for the Plattner collection in 2014. It is on view at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam; see Where to See Monet's Paintings and Claude Monet.