The Great Blue at Antibes

In January 1888 Monet left the grey of Paris for the Mediterranean, on a tip from the writer Guy de Maupassant, and settled near Antibes at a hotel called the Château de la Pinède. He stayed almost four months and came home with around 39 canvases. The light there unsettled him. He wrote that the blue, rose and gold of the coast were almost impossible to paint, and that people would think he had gone mad for the colours he was using. La Grande Bleue, the great blue, is the old French nickname for the Mediterranean itself, and that shining stretch of sea is the real subject of this picture. Back in Paris that June, the dealer Theo van Gogh, brother of the painter Vincent, bought ten of the Antibes canvases and put them up for sale. The older painter Camille Pissarro dismissed them as merely decorative, but the buyers who came to the gallery that summer felt otherwise, and the group sold.