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