Gardener’s House at Antibes

A cluster of pale houses climbs a sunlit headland above the Mediterranean at Antibes, the resort where Monet spent the winter of 1888. Working from a room above the coast, he painted the village of Antibes and its gardens in a series of views in which the southern light — pared to bands of rose, blue, and gold — dominates everything else. He later told a visitor that such mornings were worth more than a lifetime of ordinary canvases, and these Antibes paintings stand among the most radiant of his late-1880s work.