The Fort of Antibes

Monet arrived at Antibes in January 1888 on the advice of his friend the writer Guy de Maupassant, took a room in an artists' guesthouse called the Château de la Pinède, and stayed four months, working on 39 canvases. He set up on the Plage du Ponteil and looked back along the water at the old town, its bastion and cathedral, with snow still on the Alps behind. The light beat him for weeks. He wrote home that he was fencing and wrestling with the sun, and that a place like this needed to be painted with gold and precious stones. In June, a month after he came back north, the dealer Theo van Gogh bought ten of the Antibes pictures and showed them in Paris. Monet kept this one until 1890, when Durand-Ruel bought it from him.