Monet’s first encounter with the Mediterranean coast dates to 1883 when he was introduced to it by Renoir and was so dazzled he returned to paint on his own shortly thereafter. As an impressionist acclimatized to the muted tonalities of the Seine Valley and the Norman coast, Bordighera, Antibes, and later Venice offered a new challenge of interpreting light under a strikingly different range of hues and colors. When he wrote from Bordighera to his companion Alice Hoschedé in 1883, “now I really feel the landscape. I can be bold and include every tone of pink and blue; it’s enchanting it’s delicious” it was not mere hyperbole meant to assuage her impatience at his delayed return.  If there was concern that he had pressed the limits of acceptable color during the Bordighera campaign, he doubled down and afforded himself more leeway to embellish the beauty of this place with still more pink. “I’ve caught this magical landscape and it’s the enchantment of it that I’m so keen to render. Of course, lots of people will protest that it’s quite unreal and that I’m out of my mind, but that’s just too bad.”

The motif for Le Château d’Antibes is the well-known landmark that includes the Bastion Saint-André, the cathedral’s bell tower, and Grimaldi castle, built to stand as a fortress by the year 1300. Looking north from the beach at Ponteil there is unmatched visual appeal here; rippling azure waters, an ancient walled city set atop a rocky islet set against a backdrop of rising snow-capped mountains — the Alps that separate France from Italy.  Add a kaleidoscopic panoply of color and light, a simple compositional scheme of reciprocal, interlocking water and shoreline features has more salability and decorative value than an honest impressionist could have ever expected. It was, as Monet described, a setting “made golden by the sun, against beautiful blue and pink mountains and the chain of the Alps, eternally covered in snow.”

The sensory veracity of Le Château d’Antibes is undeniable.Here, Monet continues to paint on that keen edge of aggressively applied broken brushwork, sumptuously rendered with grace and sensitivity. The canvas, larger than his usual fare is not a le petit tache display; that is, the small, feathery strokes, dabs, and swirls of overlapping pigments dissolve into a mesmerizing mélange of such complexity it becomes difficult to discern where brushstrokes lie within the textured surface layers. Instead, this canvas is of another kind, an example that displays the breadth of Monet’s skill in building generous layers of broadly brushed passaged highlighted by delicately scumbled brushwork. Of particular effectiveness is the lambently brushed pastel-white skyward striations cascading downward, the descent of which is carried through the mountain scape in pinkish hues laid against the cool mauves and blues.

Le Château d’Antibes is striking for its handling and color. Picturesque for certain, it also conveys a palpable feeling of the immediacy of a moment spontaneously expressed. The air is crisp, prismatic, translucent; the paint colorful, vibrant, dazzling; and hand of the artist as accurate as it is poetic — just the sort of painting to inspire generations of Impressionist painters.