Small Country Farm at Bordighera :: Essays Papers

French, 1840-1926Small Country Farm at Bordighera1884Museum Purchase, 1943.39In January 1884 M angiotensin converting enzymet set out alone for the Mediterranean village of Bordighera, just across the Franco-Italian border. Originally intending to stay only for three weeks, Monet became so absorbed in the challenges of capturing brilliant hues of the lush landscape (so different from the cool, gray tonality of northern France) that he spent over two months there and produced forty paintings. Monet save his progress and frustrations in copious letters to friends back in capital of France These palms are driving me crazy the motifs are extremely difficult to seize, to ordain on canvas its so bushy everywhere, although de kindlingful to the eye.... I would homogeneous to do orange and lemon trees silhouetted against the blue sea but cannot dominate them as I would like. Small Country Farm at Bordighera was believably painted in March and represents his finest achievement there. Years later Monet mentioned it with one other painting of the sojourn as a work with which he was especially satisfied. In it, Monet used remarkably varied brushwork to create a wide range of optical effects and to organize his pictorial plaza as the viewers eye is carried from the thick, bushy vegetation of the foreground to the hazy fortune peaks of the distance. Above all, the painting is remarkable for its bold handling of color and rainbowlike palette, which halt 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 free is at its most dramatic sunrise, noonday and sunset. In such views as Cap Martin, near Menton (1884), Monet contrasts the intense light of the southern sun burning bright on the coastal path against the deep calm blue waters of the Mediterranean. In other pictures of chromatic groves and olive trees he focuses on the volley between light and wi ckednessMonets 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