Bordighera

Early in 1884 Monet went down to Bordighera, a town on the Italian Riviera just over the border from France. He had passed through a few weeks earlier with Renoir and been struck by the place, but he went back alone to work, partly because he found it hard to paint beside another artist. He had planned on three weeks and stayed nearly three months, wrestling with a southern light far stronger than anything on the Normandy coast. In a letter he said he was fencing with the sun. You can see the fight in this view, painted from a hillside, where the Mediterranean shows only in scraps between the twisting trunks of the local pines, and the whole picture is keyed to a heat he kept complaining he could not catch.