The Italian village of Bordighera, a resort filled with gardens and palm trees, became popular in the 1880s as a destination for upper-class English and German travelers. Situated on the Mediterranean coast of Liguria, about twenty kilometers east of the French town of Menton, it attracted Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir in 1883 in their search for new, paintable landscapes. Monet returned alone the following year and painted more than forty views of the area, the town, and its gardens. His energy was ferocious; at first, he worked on four canvases each day, and between 24 January and 2 February 1884, he completed fourteen.

Monet wanted to paint Mr. Moreno's garden in particular and waited for letters of introduction. He visited on 5 February 1884, and began painting the famous palm trees, interrupted by various excursions around the town and to Monte Carlo. As always, the artist was frustrated by aesthetic and practical difficulties (the blues were difficult, the light changed, it rained). The shimmering golden pinks and blues seemed almost incredible, as Monet wrote to his companion Alice in Giverny: "Obviously people will exclaim at their untruthfulness, at madness, but too bad they [also] say that when I paint our own climate. All that I do has the shimmering colours of brandy flame or of a pigeon's breast, yet even now I do it only timidly. I begin to get it."

*Villas at Bordighera* is a variant version of another painting. It was made by Monet for his fellow Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot, it seems at the time, as a copy of an identical view, although at twice the size of the first painting. The off-centre composition and radically cropped elements such as trees and buildings point to the ineradicable example of Japanese woodblock prints, of which Monet was a keen collector. It is interesting how naturally such influences have been absorbed and are no longer an end in themselves. Instead, Monet searches for the southern light—the harsh whites and bright light blues which unify the tamed elements of garden and town with the unconquerable suffused colors of sky and mountains.

The subject of the 'tourist view' was not new in art, as Spate has pointed out, but Monet's approach differs from the Salon's more conventional renditions in their resolutely anti-associational character. They do not evoke the past and do not refer to the inhabitants of the landscape, or its uses. They are, indeed, mute records of places visited, icons of exotic sites, and are commodities. Monet may therefore be the first painter of the avant-garde to bring his famous 'eye' to the business of promoting the safe exoticism of the Mediterranean for the sensory pleasures of modernity.

Inventory number: RF 2000 94 

PROVENANCE:

from 1884, in the Berthe Morisot collection (Mme Eugène Manet, 1841-1895)

from 1895 to 1966, in the collection of Julie Manet (Mrs. Ernest Rouart, 1878-1966), daughter of Berthe Morisot and Eugène Manet

from 1966 to 1992, private collection

from 1992 to 2000, in the GAN collection - acquired for 24 million francs by the GAN insurance group in 1992 to allow this work to be maintained in the French national heritage; placed on deposit at the Musée d'Orsay for a period of ten years from December 21, 1992 2000, acquired from the GAN according to the protocol set in 1992 (initial purchase price updated 8% per year) by the National Museums (committee of 07/12/2000, council of 13/12/2000, decree of 29/12/2000 and 10/01/2001). Acquired with the assistance of the heritage fund and thanks to the participation of the Meyer Foundation and an anonymous Canadian donation 2000, attributed to the Musée d'Orsay (listed in the inventory of Louvre paintings)