Bordighera

Claude Monet

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Keywords: Bordighera

Work Overview

Bordighera
Claude Monet
Date: 1884
Style: Impressionism
Genre: landscape
Dimensions: 81.3 x 64.8 cm
Potter Palmer Collection


Early in 1884, Claude Monet traveled to Bordighera, a town on the Italian Riviera, close to the border between Italy and France, for a working visit of three weeks that turned into nearly three months. In a letter to the sculptor Auguste Rodin describing his efforts to translate into paint the brilliant Mediterranean light, Monet declared he was "fencing, wrestling, with the sun." In other letters, he complained of the impossibility of finding a motif due to the 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.


This work is featured in the online catalogue Monet Paintings and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, the first volume in the Art Institute’s scholarly digital series on the Impressionist circle. The catalogue offers in-depth curatorial and technical entries on 47 artworks by Claude Monet in the museum’s collection; entries feature interactive and layered high-resolution imaging, previously unpublished technical photographs, archival materials, and documentation relating to each artwork.