At Cap d'Antibes, Mistral wind

At Cap d'Antibes, Mistral Wind from 1888 at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston was painted during Monet's 1888 Antibes campaign when the mistral — the fierce northwesterly wind of the Provençal coast — interrupted his work and gave him a new meteorological subject. He wrote to Alice about the difficulty of painting in the mistral's force, the easel requiring anchoring, the painted surface threatened by flying dust, the wind making sustained observation nearly impossible. Yet the mistral's effects — bent vegetation, white-capped sea, the specific atmospheric tension of strong wind over bright water — were precisely the kind of extreme condition Monet valued as a subject. His earlier experience of painting in storms at Belle-Île (where he had reportedly tied himself to rocks to avoid being blown into the sea) had accustomed him to working in difficult weather, and the mistral variants of the Antibes series have the energetic, urgent quality of paintings made against physical resistance. The Boston canvas shows a pine tree whose branches stream horizontally, the wind's force as legible in the tree's attitude as in the disturbed sea below.

Monet conveys the wind through the directional lean of the pine tree, whose branches stream to one side, and through vigorous horizontal brushwork in the churned sea surface. The sky is rendered with rapid, diagonal strokes suggesting atmospheric movement. The palette is cooler and more agitated than his calm Antibes canvases.