View of Bordighera

Claude Monet's View of Bordighera (Vue de Bordighera) was painted in 1884 during his three-month stay on the Italian Riviera. It shows the old town of Bordighera from a wooded slope to the west, with the sea rising behind it like a wall of blue. The canvas, 66 by 81.8 centimeters (Wildenstein 853), is in the Armand Hammer Collection at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

What you are looking at

The painting is built like a stage set. Two masses of dark pine frame the view: a dense, rounded clump at left and, at right, a tree whose pale trunk and limbs twist across the green like white veins. Through the gap between them the eye drops to a tight cluster of houses on a ridge, painted in sugared pinks, creams and yellows and dominated by the square campanile of the church of Santa Maria Maddalena. Lower down, a white building with its own tower catches the full sun and is the brightest thing on the canvas.

Behind the town, the Mediterranean is laid in as a single band of ultramarine, so dark and saturated it almost reads as a second hillside. Two tiny white sails float on it at right. The sky above is pale and streaky, washed with lilac, pink and green, as if the heat were bleaching it. The foreground vegetation, by contrast, is a riot of greens shot through with red, orange and blue touches that suggest flowers, new growth and reflected light.

The small detail to look for is the twisting white branch at the right edge. Monet paints it with thick, broken strokes of cream and ocher, and it acts as a frame within the frame, leading the eye from the foreground down toward the town.

Where and when

Monet first saw Bordighera with Renoir in December 1883 and came back alone in January 1884, planning a short visit that stretched until April. He found the light both thrilling and exhausting, writing to friends about the impossible blues and pinks he was trying to match. Much of his work there was done from the hills behind the town. This view was taken from the Collina dei Mostaccini, a slope west of Bordighera that looks over the old quarter toward the sea.

The Bordighera views and how this one differs

Monet painted the old town from this hillside more than once. A closely related canvas, Bordighera in the Art Institute of Chicago (Wildenstein 854), shows the same town and sea through a screen of pines, but there the twisted trunks of the trees dominate the foreground. In the Hammer picture the trees part to make room for the view, and the town and the dark band of sea take center stage. The same campanile also appears in the background of Villas at Bordighera in the Hasso Plattner Collection, and Monet's palm-filled garden views, such as Palm Trees at Bordighera in the Met, belong to the same campaign.

What sets this version apart is its contrast of near and far. The foreground is cool and dense, the town warm and luminous, the sea almost black-blue. It is one of the most strongly colored of all the Bordighera pictures, and a clear sign of how far the southern light pushed Monet's palette.

How it was painted

The surface is worked in short, energetic strokes. In the pines they are thick, curling dabs of dark green and blue; in the town they become small squarish patches of pink and cream, each a wall or roof; in the sea they are horizontal, smoother and more even. Monet uses almost no black: the darkest passages are deep greens and blues. The signature and date, "Claude Monet 84", are written in the lower left corner.

Where to see it

The painting is part of the Armand Hammer Collection at the Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, the gift of the Armand Hammer Foundation. In 2018 it traveled to London for the National Gallery exhibition Monet and Architecture. For Monet's southern work as a whole, see Monet on the Mediterranean; for other museums with his paintings, Where to See Monet's Paintings; and for the artist, Claude Monet.