Bordighera

Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926)

1884

Medium
Oil on canvas
Classification
Painting
Dimensions
65 × 80.8 cm (25 5/8 × 31 13/16 in.); Framed: 80.4 × 96.6 × 8.3 cm (31 5/8 × 38 × 3 1/4 in.)
Culture
France
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
Credit line
Potter Palmer Collection
Rights
Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
Who can see it
Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed

View at the Art Institute of Chicago

About this work

Early in 1884 Claude Monet traveled to Bordighera, a town on the Italian Riviera near the border between Italy and France, for a working visit of three weeks that turned into nearly three months. In a letter to sculptor Auguste Rodin describing his efforts to capture the brilliant Mediterranean light, Monet declared that he was “fencing, wrestling, with the sun.” In other letters he complained of the impossibility of finding a suitable subject amid the region’s abundant vegetation. In this sun-drenched composition painted from a hilltop vantage point, the sea is barely visible through the interlaced trunks of local pine trees.

Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0