Claude Monet painted “Antibes Seen From the Salis Gardens” in 1888. It is one of a number of paintings of the view of Antibes that he painted that year. The painting depicts this view as seen from the Salis Gardens. It is morning and the sun is rising. It is spreading its light out across the sky just like the morning rays are reaching both the trees of the garden and the buildings of Antibes. The color of the foremost trees tells us that Monet painted this in the beginning of fall.
Antibes Seen From the Salis Gardens is painted using the delicate, masterful brush strokes of Claude Monet in his prime. The small visible brush strokes offers a focus on color over line and contributes to the splendid depiction of color and light that makes this Monet painting so beautiful.
The shimmering light of mid-afternoon infuses Claude Monet's painting of the old fortified coastal town of Antibes in the south of France. Monet traveled there in January of 1888 and was dazzled by the light and the striking scenery of the legendary. However, he sometimes struggled with how to represent it on canvas, writing to his friend the sculptor Auguste Rodin, "I'm fencing and wrestling with the sun. And what a sun it is! In order to paint here one would need gold and precious stones."
Monet chose to paint this view from the vantage point of the Garden of La Salis across the cape from Antibes. He positioned himself at the bottom of the garden, close to the water. A large, twisting olive tree dominates the composition, and Antibes sparkles in the distance. His efforts to express the light and color of the Mediterranean fulfilled a promise to his companion, Alice Hosched? that what he would paint in Antibes would be itself, white, pink, blue, all of it enveloped in this fairy-tale like air." Gallery wrapped and ready to hang, this reproduction of the 1888 painting "Antibes, View of Salis" by Claude Monetis carefully recreate by master artist detail-by-detail, color-by-color to near perfection in order to preserve the sentiment and splendor of the original masterpiece, using finest oil on high quality cotton canvas.
Today, Antibes Seen From the Salis Gardens can be found at the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio. |