The Fort of Antibes

Claude Monet's The Fort of Antibes (Antibes, le fort) was painted in 1888, during the four months he spent on the Côte d'Azur that year. It shows the ramparts, towers and rooftops of old Antibes floating between a sheet of glittering sea and a range of snowy Alps. The canvas, 65 by 81 centimeters (Wildenstein 1161a), is signed and dated "Claude Monet 88" at lower left. It belongs to the Hasso Plattner Collection at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam.

What you are looking at

The composition is almost entirely horizontal. The lower half of the canvas is sea, a vibrating field of short strokes in turquoise, jade, ultramarine and lilac, with no boats and no waves to speak of, just light moving on water. Across the middle runs a low spit of rocks in rust, ocher and pink, and on it stands the town: a long rampart wall at left, then a stacked mass of houses in cream, apricot and rose, crowned by two square towers.

Behind Antibes, the snow-covered Alps stretch across the whole width of the picture, painted in pinks, whites and pale blues, with a darker blue foothill sloping down at right to meet the sea. Above them the sky takes up nearly half the canvas. It is not a hard Mediterranean blue but a hazy, milky green-gray streaked with pink, the color of a bright day seen through heat and salt air.

The Barberini identifies the landmarks: the Bastion Saint-André on the left, the Château Grimaldi and the tower of the cathedral of Notre-Dame-de-la-Platea. Monet painted them from a distance, from the Plage du Ponteil across the bay, which let him give the whole foreground to the sea.

Where and when

Monet spent January to May 1888 at Antibes, staying at the Château de la Pinède, a lodging for artists recommended by Guy de Maupassant. He produced some thirty-nine compositions there. It was a deliberate return to the south four years after Bordighera, and this time he arrived with a plan: to find a few strong motifs and paint them repeatedly in different lights. The old town seen across the water was one of them. He fought with the mistral, which threatened to blow his easel over, and with a light he found exceptionally hard to render.

The Antibes canvases were shown at the Boussod, Valadon et Cie gallery in Paris in June 1888, where they were managed by Theo van Gogh, and they sold well.

How this version differs

Monet painted Antibes from several angles that spring. In Morning at Antibes in Philadelphia the town is a pale strip far across the water, overshadowed by a big feathery tree; in Gardener's House at Antibes in Cleveland its towers appear far off beyond a cottage roof; and in the Courtauld's Antibes a single leaning pine stands on the shore against the sea and pink mountains. The Fort of Antibes is the frontal, panoramic version: town, sea and mountains in three clean bands, with nothing in between. A closely related view is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The Barberini describes how Monet built up blue, red, green and orange from a white base to capture the intensity of the southern light. Here that technique produces something almost decorative: the town silhouette and the Alpine range in pink, ocher and white form a frieze against the cool sea and sky.

How it was painted

The sea is painted in small, horizontal, closely set strokes of pure color, which mix in the eye into a shimmering surface. The town is built of slightly larger, blockier touches that give walls and roofs their solidity. The mountains are softer, almost dissolved into the sky. The overall key is high and pale, with very few dark values: even the shadows are lilac and blue.

For all of Monet's southern pictures, from Bordighera in 1884 to Antibes in 1888, see Monet on the Mediterranean.

Ownership and where to see it

Durand-Ruel bought the painting from Monet in June 1890 and sold it that September to the Boston collector Peter Chardon Brooks, through the painter and agent Joseph Foxcroft Cole. It stayed in his family for nearly ninety years and was given to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1978. The museum sold it at Sotheby's New York in November 2011, and it later entered the Plattner collection. It is now shown at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam. See Where to See Monet's Paintings and Claude Monet.