Valle Buona, near Bordighera

Claude Monet's Valle Buona, near Bordighera was painted in 1884, when Monet left the palms and villa gardens of the Riviera town and walked inland into the hills. It shows a valley thick with olive trees, closed by a ridge of blue mountains. The canvas, roughly 63.5 by 90 centimeters, is signed and dated "Claude Monet 84" at lower right and catalogued by Wildenstein as number 858. It is in the Dallas Museum of Art, the gift of the Meadows Foundation.

What you are looking at

The picture is organized in three horizontal bands. Across the bottom runs a stony, sunlit foreground of pale pinks, creams and pale greens, perhaps a dry streambed or a terrace edge, painted in short, scattered strokes. Above it, the middle of the canvas is one great mass of olive trees, rising up the slope to the right. Monet paints them as a shimmering field of gray-green, silver and blue, with darker touches where the trunks and shadows show through. In the lower right, half buried in the trees, is a small stone hut with a rust-colored roof.

Behind the olives, two mountains rise against the sky. The one on the left is greener and terraced, with a village of pinkish houses clinging to its lower flank; the higher one at center right is a dense, cool blue, its crest catching a strip of light. Near its summit, a tiny yellow cluster of buildings glows in the sun. The sky is blue with a few small clouds lit pink and gold, as if late in the day.

The detail worth looking for is how Monet tells olive from mountain. Both are blue-green, but the olives are broken into hundreds of small, vibrating touches, while the mountain is laid in with longer, smoother strokes that follow its slope. Texture, not color, separates near from far.

Where and when

Monet stayed at Bordighera from January to April 1884, his first long campaign in the south. Most of his canvases there show the town, its gardens and its palms, but he also explored the valleys behind it, where the hillsides were planted with old olive groves. The Valle Buona is one of these inland valleys. The same impulse produced The Valley of the Nervia in the Metropolitan Museum, a view up another valley toward the mountains, and the grove interiors such as Under the Lemon Trees.

Monet found olive trees especially hard to paint, and said so in his letters from the Riviera. Their silvery leaves change color with every breath of wind and every shift of the sun. This canvas is one of his attempts to solve the problem at the scale of a whole valley.

How this version differs

Compared with the town views from the Collina dei Mostaccini, such as View of Bordighera and Bordighera, Valle Buona has no sea and almost no architecture. Its palette is cooler, dominated by grays, blue-greens and violets, with warm notes reserved for the foreground stones, the hut roof and the sunlit village. It is closer to the Norman valley pictures Monet painted in the following years, like Winter Landscape at the Val de Falaise, than to the exotic garden pieces of the same trip.

How it was painted

The olive grove is the densest passage: dabs and short dashes of silver-gray, green, blue and violet, layered wet over wet so that the surface seems to flicker. The mountains are painted more smoothly and thinly, and the sky is brushed with broad, diagonal strokes, the clouds added as small thick touches of pink and cream. The foreground is the loosest area, with patches of bare canvas showing between the strokes.

Where to see it

The painting entered the Dallas Museum of Art in 1981 as a gift of the Meadows Foundation, and it has traveled for exhibitions including Monet: Luces del Impresionismo in Mexico City in 2023. For the full Riviera story see Monet on the Mediterranean; for other museums with his work, Where to See Monet's Paintings; and for the painter, Claude Monet.