Villas at Bordighera

Claude Monet's Villas at Bordighera (Villas à Bordighera) of 1884 shows the garden of the Villa Garnier, the winter house that Charles Garnier, architect of the Paris Opéra, built for his family at Bordighera in 1871–73. The canvas, 61 by 74 centimeters, is signed and dated "Claude Monet 84" at lower right and catalogued by Wildenstein as number 857a. It belongs to the Hasso Plattner Collection at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam. For decades it hung in the house of Monet's own brother.

What you are looking at

Almost the whole lower half of the canvas is garden: a deep, tumbling bank of shrubs, spiky leaves and flowers in greens and yellow-greens, pricked with pink, red, violet and white. There is no path and no lawn, only vegetation pressing toward the viewer. At the bottom edge a clump of white blossoms and a fan of sword-shaped leaves are the most precisely painted things in the picture.

On the left, the pale tower of the neighboring Villa Etelinda rises out of the greenery, its arched openings cut off by the edge of the canvas and partly screened by a palm. In the center a single date palm stands up against the sky, its crown of thin, yellowish fronds radiating like a firework. Behind it, on the ridge, the old town of Bordighera huddles in grays and violets, dominated by the bell tower of the church of Santa Maria Maddalena. The sky is a broad expanse of soft blue, brushed thinly.

The Barberini points out a piece of quiet stage management. Monet moved the palm to the center of the composition, which cuts down the presence of the grand Villa Etelinda, showing only its tower, and makes the garden, not the architecture, the subject. The tower of the villa and the campanile of the church echo each other across the picture.

Where and when

Monet spent three months at Bordighera in early 1884, his first long stay in the south. He was drawn to the gardens of the foreign villas, which were filled with exotic plants; Garnier's garden alone held several hundred species. This view and three others were painted from the slope known as the Collina dei Mostaccini, which looks over the villas toward the old town. One of those, Bordighera, Italy, is also in the Plattner collection; others include View of Bordighera at the Hammer Museum and Bordighera in Chicago.

Monet made only three painting trips to the Mediterranean: with Renoir in December 1883, alone to Bordighera in 1884, and to Antibes in 1888. He was among the first painters to treat the coast systematically, years before the name Côte d'Azur was coined in 1887 and before Signac and Cross followed him south.

How this version differs

Several Bordighera pictures carry the title Villas. The Musée d'Orsay's Villas at Bordighera and the Santa Barbara Villas in Bordighera look along the Strada Romana toward the mountains, as does Strada Romana in Bordighera. This canvas looks the other way, down over the garden toward the town, and swaps the mountain backdrop for the bell tower. It is denser and more enclosed, a picture of foliage before it is a picture of houses.

How it was painted

The garden is built of short, curved, overlapping strokes of high-keyed color, worked wet into wet. The town is painted much more thinly, in broken touches of gray, lilac and ocher, so that it seems to sit back in the haze. The sky is a light, almost scrubbed layer of blue through which the canvas texture shows. The palette is the one Monet described in letters from Bordighera: pinks and blues he had never needed in Normandy.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting went to Léon-Pascal Monet, the painter's younger brother, a chemist and industrialist near Rouen, who kept it from 1884 until his death in 1917. It then passed to his heir and remained in the family until 1979. After a period in a private collection it was acquired on the art market in 2007 and is now shown at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam. For more southern pictures see Monet on the Mediterranean; for other collections, Where to See Monet's Paintings; and for the painter, Claude Monet.