Villas at Bordighera

Early in 1884 Monet travelled alone to Bordighera, a town on the Italian Riviera just over the French border, and found a light and vegetation quite unlike anything at home. He wrote that the gardens there, especially one belonging to a Monsieur Moreno, were an earthly paradise, full of palms and lemon trees. He made rapid studies on the spot among that foliage. This larger canvas he worked up afterwards in his studio at Giverny, as a decorative panel for the drawing room of his friend, the painter Berthe Morisot. The villas sit half-buried in a tangle of blue-green growth, the buildings almost an afterthought behind the plants.