Art Institute of Chicago

Bordighera

Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926)

Date

1884

Medium

Oil on canvas

Culture

France

Department

Painting and Sculpture of Europe

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

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.

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