La Grenouillère

1869

Oil on canvas, 74.6 × 99.7 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Bathers and boaters at a floating café on the Seine, painted quickly in 1869 beside Renoir. It points straight toward the style later called Impressionist.

La Grenouillère ("the frog pond") was a bathing and boating spot at Croissy, west of Paris.
Monet called his 1869 pictures here poor rough sketches; this is thought to be one.
Renoir painted almost the same view, now in Stockholm.
Monet paints the rippling water in short, separate strokes of blue, green and black, not blended. This broken brushwork became the hallmark of Impressionism.
It came to the Met in 1929 with Louisine Havemeyer's bequest.

New resorts on the Seine drew Parisians of every class for weekend boating and swimming. Here women in black bathing suits mix with men in top hats.

Plein air: French for "open air": painting outdoors, in front of the subject.

Image: Wikimedia Commons (CC0 file from The Met's Open Access release) · CC0