Details

Object type

painting

Title

View of Ventimiglia

Artist/Maker

Claude Oscar Monet artist

Culture/School

French

Place Associated

Ventimiglia, Italy

Date

1884

Materials

oil on canvas

Dimensions

framed: 923 mm x 1200 mm x 120 mm 28500 g; unframed: 651 x 917 mm

Description

Landscape featuring blue green lake, with cluster of buildings suggesting the town of Ventimiglia to the right centre. Mountains are on the horizon above, and shrubby green and purple bushes can be seen in the foreground. Sky is a deep blue at the top, fading to a lighter blue moving down towards the mountain range.

Ventimiglia, just inside the Italian border with France, is close to Bordighera, the picturesque Italian seaside resort town where Claude Monet stayed for three months during 1884. This is one of 45 paintings that he painted during his visit.

Monet’s daily letters to Alice Hoschedé, his companion and future wife, are a marvellous record of the exhilaration and frustration he experienced in his attempt to understand how to capture the heat, the brilliant light and the luxuriant vegetation of the Mediterranean coast.

He described 'slaving away on six paintings a day. I'm giving myself a hard time over it as I haven't yet managed to capture the colour of this landscape; there are moments when I am appalled at the colours I am having to use. I'm afraid that what I am doing is just dreadful.’

Monet realised that the colours he needed – ‘a palette of diamonds and jewels because of the blues and pinks’ – would make people ‘exclaim at their untruthfulness’.

Credit Line/Donor

Presented by the Trustees of the Hamilton Bequest, 1943

ID Number

2336

Location

Out on Loan