Antibes Seen from La Salis
Claude Monet
CLAUDE MONET, 1888. OIL ON CANVAS.
Even the great master of Impressionism himself, who had taught the world how to capture nature, light, color, and form in all of its beauty and translate the splendour of the environment into oil and canvas, felt humbled by the view ahead of him. Spending the summer in France’s southern coast in the old town of Antibes, Claude Monet would walk the landscapes along the Azure Coast with his easel and canvas, setting up to paint en plein air, wherever the beauty struck him. Yet, unusually, he laboured over the works here. The sun, the trees, the sea, all were, as he wrote in letters to friends and contemporaries, almost too beautiful to bear - ‘In order to paint here one would need gold and precious stones’, he wrote to the sculptor Auguste Rodin. He saw Antibes as a fairy-tale town, one that existed as much in the imagination as it did in reality, and so his usually deftness of capturing the impression, the feeling of a moment was further out of reach. Yet his work here is some of the most delicate and beautiful of his career, the dazzling sweetness of the landscape is abundant and intoxicating.