Early in 1884, Claude Monet traveled to Bordighera, a town on the Italian Riviera, close to the border between Italy and France, for a working visit of three weeks that turned into nearly three months. In a letter to the sculptor, Auguste Rodino describing his efforts to translate into paint the brilliant Mediterranean light, Monet declared he was "fencing, wrestling, with the sun." In other letters, he complained of the impossibility of finding a motif due to the abundant vegetation. In this sun-drenched composition painted from a hilltop vantage point, the sea is barely visible through the interlaced trunks of local pine trees.