Villas at Bordighera

What you are looking at

A tall agave stalk, thin and crooked, shoots up the center of the canvas almost to the top edge, its flower clusters painted as small red-brown tufts. At its base a great spiky agave plant spreads its blue-green blades across the lower right. Around it, a garden of palms and shrubs fills the foreground in a tangle of greens, ochres and rusts. To the right rises the pale, sunlit tower of a villa with arched windows and balconies, cut off by the edge of the picture.

On the left, a path runs downhill past more villas, their walls cream and pink, their shutters green. Behind everything, the mountains of the Ligurian Alps rise in hazy blue and violet, and the sky is a pale, luminous blue-green. The light is the strong, white light of the Mediterranean, and the shadows are blue.

Where and when it was painted

In January 1884 Monet traveled to Bordighera on the Italian Riviera, near the French border, and stayed until April. He had visited briefly with Renoir in December 1883 and returned alone, determined to capture the southern light. He found it difficult: in his letters he complained that the colors were too bright and the light impossible to paint, that he needed "diamonds and precious stones" on his palette.

Bordighera was then a fashionable winter resort for the British and other wealthy foreigners, and its gardens were full of exotic plants. The tower on the right belongs to the Villa Etelinda, built for the banker Raphaël Bischoffsheim by Charles Garnier, the architect of the Paris Opéra, who had a house in the town. Monet painted the villas from the hillside above.

He painted two versions of this view. The Orsay's is the larger and nearly square, with the character of a decorative panel. It was worked up after his return, at Giverny, from the studies made on the spot. The other version, smaller and more horizontal, is in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, published here as Villas in Bordighera.

How it was painted

The agave stalk is the key to the composition: a single wavering vertical that divides the canvas and leads the eye up from the dense garden to the open sky. Around it Monet weaves the plants and buildings into an allover pattern of strokes, short, curving and crossing, that fills almost every part of the surface.

The palette is warmer and brighter than in his northern pictures. Monet sets the cool blues and violets of the mountains against the warm creams and pinks of the villas and the rusts and ochres of the garden. The shadows are painted in blue and turquoise, never in brown or black. The tower is laid in with thick, chalky white, the brightest note on the canvas.

The agave is a deliberate exotic touch. These plants flower only once, after many years, sending up a single tall stalk and then dying, and a flowering agave was a sight northern visitors to the Riviera went out of their way to see. Monet uses its strange, angular silhouette almost like a Japanese motif, an asymmetrical line that breaks the expected order of a landscape.

Bordighera and the Mediterranean

The Bordighera campaign produced about fifty canvases, including Palm Trees at Bordighera at the Met, Bordighera at the Art Institute of Chicago and The Valley of the Nervia. It was the first of Monet's journeys to the south, followed by Antibes in 1888. See Monet on the Mediterranean.

Ownership

The painting was acquired by the Musée d'Orsay in 2000 (RF 2000-94) with support from the Fonds du Patrimoine, the Meyer Foundation and an anonymous Canadian donor.

Where to see it

Villas at Bordighera is in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. See Monet at the Musée d'Orsay for the museum's other Monets.