Interpretive Resource

During the 1870's, when the Impressionist movement reached its fullest expression, Monet spent most of his time in and around the city of Paris. His quintessential compositions of that decade are suburban, representing towns and villages west of the great capital. After the death of his wife Camille in 1879, Monet traveled much more widely and turned away from this urban and suburban world. His subjects became more remote and Romantic; the small country houses, gardens, and river views of the Ile-de-France that had dominated his oeuvre of the 1870's were replaced by the sea, vast rocks and cliffs, and dramatic views of isolated villages and buildings. Most often, these are unpeopled, intensifying the solitude that the artist wished to express.

In other cases, such as Cliff Walk at Pourville, the human figures are so tiny and slight that they appear overwhelmed by the natural world that surrounds them. Here, two beautifully dressed female figures stand at the edge of the cliffs of Pourville, looking out over a choppy sea, the wind whipping through their delicate dresses. These women have followed no visible path, and they seem, like the sailboats in the greenish waters of the English Channel, only a temporary presence in the vast space they contemplate.

Monet spent much of the summer and autumn of 1882 in a house called the Villa Julietta in the town of Pourville along the Norman coast. He wrote to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel on June 28: "We are all enchanted to be here. The children are in perfect health; and me, after several good long walks, I am ready to work with renewed ardor." The Cliff Walk at Pourville was purchased from Monet by Durand-Ruel that October, probably just after Monet and his family had left Pourville; it was included in the first important Monet retrospective, held at Durand-Ruel’s gallery early in 1883.

In 1882 and 1883, Monet scoured the cliffs of the Norman coast, and he spent much of 1884 around the Mediterranean. In February of that year, he discovered the Italian resort town of Bordighera, where he stayed throughout most of the winter and early spring painting the town’s wild, exotic vegetation and landscapes along the dramatic neighboring mountains. Bordighera is among the most confidently, indeed, brilliantly composed of his efforts. Monet filled the foreground with the rhythmically curved forms of local pines, whose almost calligraphic shapes resulted from centuries of being buffetted by strong coastal winds. In spite of the fact that the old town is directly in the center of the composition, it is by no means the major motif of the painting. More than the town, Monet was fascinated by the interaction of the intense greens of the trees and the deep blue of the Mediterranean. Although villas and villages are depicted in abundance, Monet’s landscapes, like those of Cézanne, are deserted, dominated more by the forces of nature than by the taming presence of man. In this way, Monet’s Mediterranean landscapes show evidence of his mythic and Romantic aspirations, and, perhaps, of an intense, undefinable loneliness.

These expressionist, late Romantic landscapes appealed very much to American collectors of Monet, and many of them were acquired by collectors in Boston and Chicago during the late nineteenth century from Monet’s major dealers, Durand-Ruel and Boussoud et Vailadon. Bordighera was among the many such paintings purchased by Bertha Palmer in the early 1890's, and it was frequently exhibited at the Art Institute before it was given to the museum in 1922.