Giardino a Bordighera, impressione del mattino

Early in 1884 Monet went south alone to Bordighera, a town on the Italian coast just over the border from France. He had passed through the Riviera with Renoir a few weeks earlier and decided he had to come back by himself to paint it properly. The light there stunned him. He wrote to a friend that he had set up in a fairyland and that it would take a palette of diamonds and precious stones to get it down. This is one of the pictures he brought back, a garden thick with palm trees and, behind them, a church tower catching the morning. He stayed from January to April and worked at a furious pace, complaining the whole time that the colours of the place were almost impossible to get right.