Cap Martin, near Menton

Cap Martin is the wooded point that closes the bay of Menton on its western side, close to the Italian border at the far end of the French Riviera. The Museum of Fine Arts places us on the eastern side of the cape, looking across the water toward the Maritime Alps. Monet painted a small group of views here in April 1884, at the end of a long stay on that coast. The sky fills a large part of this canvas, and he barely worked it, putting in only a few sketchy strokes for the edges of the clouds and the ridge of the mountains, to suggest the open expanse of the sky. He signed it at the lower right with the year, 84, and it may have gone to his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, as soon as the following month. Seven years later it was in New York. In February 1891 its owner lent it to a three-day exhibition at the Union Club, a gentlemen's club in Manhattan, and in 1925 it came to the museum in Boston.