Bordighera

Bordighera was painted in early 1884 during a solo working trip to the Italian Riviera, the first time Monet had painted in southern light. He was struck by the intensity of Mediterranean colour — the brightness he had never encountered in Normandy or the Île-de-France — and worked obsessively for three months on the motif of the Bordighera vegetation: the palms, olive trees, and bougainvillea under a fierce sun. He complained to Alice Hoschedé in letters that he struggled to capture the extraordinary light without his colours looking garish; the resulting canvases were among the most colouristically radical he had produced, and he kept several for himself.

The Mediterranean light gives the palette an intensity quite different from Monet's northern French work — blues and greens pushed toward viridian and cobalt, shadows tinged with violet. The palm fronds are rendered with directional strokes following their curving form. The overall chromatic temperature is significantly warmer and more saturated than his Normandy canvases.