View of Cap d’Antibes

Claude Monet's 1888 views of Cap d'Antibes belong to his extended winter campaigns in the south of France — journeys he undertook to encounter the intense Mediterranean light and color that challenged and transformed his northern sensibility. The Côte d'Azur's light was radically different from the diffused, silvery quality of the Channel and Seine — harsher, more directional, producing saturated color and dense shadow. Monet worked at Antibes and Juan-les-Pins in early 1888, producing a series of paintings that documented both the physical beauty of the Mediterranean coast and his investigation of how to represent a wholly different quality of light.

Monet's Mediterranean palette differs perceptibly from his northern work — more saturated blues and greens in sea and sky, more intense ochres and mauves in the rocky coastal terrain. His brushwork is more assertive in these sun-filled paintings, the marks larger and more directional than the atmospheric softness of his Normandy work. The deep blue of the Mediterranean sea provides a chromatic intensity that drove new experiments with pure, unmixed color.