Small Country Farm at Bordighera :: Essays Papers

French, 1840-1926Small Country Farm at Bordighera1884Museum Purchase, 1943.39In January 1884 Monet set out alone for the Mediterranean village of Bordighera, reasonable across the Franco-Italian border. Originally intending to stay only for three weeks, Monet became so indifferent in the challenges of capturing brilliant hues of the lush landscape (so different from the cool, gray headstone of northern France) that he spent over two months there and produced 40 paintings. Monet recorded his progress and frustrations in copious letters to friends back in Paris These palms are driving me crazy the motifs are extremely nasty to seize, to put on canvas its so bushy everywhere, although de start outful to the eye.... I would like to do orange and lemon trees silhouetted against the blue sea hardly cannot find them as I would like. Small Country Farm at Bordighera was probably painted in March and represents his finest achievement there. Years afterwards Monet mentioned it with one new(prenominal) painting of the sojourn as a run short with which he was especially satisfied. In it, Monet used remarkably varied brushwork to take a crap a wide range of optical effects and to organize his lifelike space as the viewers eye is carried from the thick, bushy vegetation of the foreground to the wooly-minded mountain peaks of the distance. Above all, the painting is remarkable for its bold handling of discolor and rainbowlike palette, which point away from the years of classic Impressionism to the color-saturated paintings of Monets final decades in Giverny. Monet often represented the times of the day when light is at its most salient sunrise, midday and sunset. In such views as Cap Martin, near Menton (1884), Monet contrasts the utmost(prenominal) light of the southern sun burning bright on the coastal road against the deep calm blue waters of the Mediterranean. In other pictures of olive groves and olive trees he focuses on the volley between light and shad owMonets pictorial style is the quintessence of Impressionism -- an investigation of the transformational properties of light. Emile Zola, the 19th-century French novelist and critic, wrote that Impressionism is a perception of the world through a temperament. A scrupulous observer of light and color, Monet could define what he was feeling with loose brushwork and