Morning at Antibes

Monet went south in January 1888 on his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel's advice and stayed at Antibes until April. The light beat him for weeks. He wrote to Alice Hoschede, who was living with him and would later marry him, that the place was beautiful and terribly hard to paint, and he complained that everything was coming out pink and blue and gold.

The old walled town sits across the water, half dissolved in haze. The handling is unusually smooth for him, laid down in long soft strokes that hold the morning heat still rather than breaking it up.

In June that year the dealer Theo van Gogh, Vincent's brother, bought ten of the Antibes canvases and put them on show in Paris. Monet had made them in about three months on the spot.