During the winter and spring of 1888, Claude Monet stayed at the coastal town of Antibes on the French Riviera, where he painted some of the most luminous works of his career. Enchanted by the soft Mediterranean light and the shimmering blues of the sea, Monet created a series of about 40 paintings of the old fortified town. He wrote to Alice Hoschedé that what he captured there would be “sweetness itself, white, pink, and blue, all enveloped in a magical air.” Unable to part with many of these works at first, Monet later exhibited them to great acclaim, their radiant calm standing as some of his most serene meditations on light. Today, several of the Antibes paintings belong to major collections, including the Musée d’Orsay and the Courtauld Gallery.