Claude Monet, 'Bathers at La Grenouillère', 1869

Bathers at La Grenouillère

Claude Monet

Room 41

About the work

Overview

During the summer of 1869, Monet and Renoir painted together at La Grenouillère, a slightly raffish resort on the river Seine some 12 kilometres west of Paris. It had become a popular weekend retreat from the city during the 1860s.

Monet made several oil sketches at the resort, including this picture, in preparation for a large painting of the site that he planned to exhibit at the Salon of 1870. Painted quickly and technically quite crude, these studies have a directness and immediacy that could not be achieved in the studio. Monet was painting what he saw, without any attempt to tidy up the scene. Rather than a documentary record of La Grenouillère, he presents a summary of his own experience of fleeting visual effects or impressions that changed moment to moment. As pictures in their own right, these sketches were an important step towards Impressionism.

In-depth

During the summer of 1869, Monet and Renoir painted together at La Grenouillère, a slightly raffish resort on the river Seine, some 12 kilometres west of Paris, not far from where Monet was living. La Grenouillère (literally, ‘The Frog Pond’) had been ‘discovered’ by artists, writers, musicians and performers about a decade earlier, and during the 1860s it became a popular weekend retreat from the city.

The resort was easily reached by rail (from the Gare Saint-Lazare, which Monet painted several times) or by coach and offered a range of leisure activities, including boating, fishing and swimming. There was also a floating restaurant (out of frame to the right of the picture) and dance hall, as well as riverside tables for drinking and dining. Attracting a wide cross-section of Parisian society, the resort was even visited by the Emperor Napoleon III, accompanied by his wife and son, during the same summer that Monet and Renoir were working there. Although some contemporaries, including the writer Maupassant, judged La Grenouillère to be a vulgar pleasure-spot populated by low-class revellers, it offered the type of modern life subject that other writers, such as Baudelaire and the Goncourt brothers, had been urging artists to engage with.

The paintings Monet made at the resort were part of his project to complete a large painting of the site, which he planned to exhibit at the Salon of 1870. He was initially sceptical about what he had achieved. Writing to fellow artist Frédéric Bazille on 25 September 1869 he explained: ‘I indeed have a dream, a painting of bathing at La Grenouillère, for which I have made some bad sketches, but it’s a dream. Renoir, who has been spending two months here, also wants to do this picture.’ Between them, Monet and Renoir produced six paintings of La Grenouillère.

The ‘bad sketches’ Monet referred to include this painting and one now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He also painted a small study of two of the rowing boats (Kunsthalle, Berne). Another painting of La Grenouillère was rejected by the Salon of 1870 and is probably the picture, formerly in the Arnhold Collection in Berlin but destroyed during Second World War, known only from a photograph. That photograph shows a more finished composition that was painted on a slightly larger canvas. Wider in format than the National Gallery and Metropolitan Museum sketches, the Salon picture combined elements from both and included other details such as sailing boats and a crowd of fashionable visitors. Extending beyond the right-hand edge of the National Gallery’s picture, it showed the pontoon footbridge leading to a small circular island (nicknamed ‘the Camembert’) and, beyond that, the floating restaurant. These are included in the New York painting.

Although Monet had been regularly painting outdoors, his letter to Bazille indicates that he made a distinction between a sketch (pochade) completed rapidly on site and a finished picture (tableau), possibly for exhibition, that had been worked up in a studio. Although the two La Grenouillère sketches were painted quickly and are technically quite crude, they have a directness and immediacy that could not be achieved in the studio. In both pictures, Monet was painting what he saw, without any attempt to tidy up the scene. Close examination of the National Gallery picture reveals that he probably painted on a used canvas and that parts of the picture were hurriedly reworked. The spontaneity of his method is evident, too, in his rejection of traditional methods of creating the illusion of three-dimensional space through linear perspective and conventional compositional devices. For example, he has not used a framing device (such as receding lines of trees or foliage) to create an effect of spatial recession. There is no central point or object of focus, and the horizon is placed close to the top of the picture. Although the lines of the boats do lead our eye along the bend of the river, any smooth access into the picture is interrupted by the horizontal line of the footbridge, which cuts across the canvas, effectively bisecting it, and by the vertical figures walking along it.

Both the bridge and the figures draw attention to the picture as a flat design, an emphasis that is amplified by the handling of the paint. Monet avoids conventional painterly modelling of forms in the round through light and shade, instead using swift, sketchy notation. He has indicated the shapes of the boats with thick lines of paint, rather than delineating them in detail. Broad strokes block in figures, foliage and bands of light reflected on the water, much of which is, unusually, in shadow. Some areas, including the trees, appear unfinished; details elsewhere, such as the bathers in the river, are captured with just dabs of paint. Even the larger figures, including the almost crudely caricatural depiction of the two women in bathing costumes and the man on the walkway, are rendered with just a few swift strokes.

Two technical innovations contributed to Monet’s painting method. The advent of soft metal tubes of oil paint ready for immediate use made painting outdoors much easier, and the introduction of a metal ferrule for paintbrushes led to the production of flat, rather than round, brushes. These new brushes enabled a new type of brushstroke – a broad, flat and evenly painted patch of colour. Monet created his painting though multiple coloured patches which, together with his limited range of strong colours, give the painting a decorative unity. His marks on the canvas are not literal transcriptions of the scene that was before him but are instead equivalences – in paint – of what he was observing. Rather than a documentary record of La Grenouillère, Monet presents a summary of his own experience of fleeting visual effects or impressions that changed moment to moment.

Monet may initially have been dissatisfied with his ‘bad sketches’ at La Grenouillère, but these impressions were nonetheless pictures in their own right and not merely steps towards a ‘finished’ painting. In painting a scene of contemporary urban leisure in a distinctly new way, Monet was moving towards a way of painting soon to be known as Impressionism.

Audio description

5 min 06 sec
Listen to an audio description of Claude Monet's 'Bathers at La Grenouillère'

Transcript

This is a description of 'Bathers at La Grenouillere', by Claude Monet painted in 1869. It is oil on canvas, 73cm high by 92cm wide, in a substantial but not overly ornate gold frame.

This painting captures a vibrant scene of contemporary leisure on a sunny day at the river. La Grenouillere or ‘The Frogpond’ was a resort on an island in the river Seine to the West of Paris, accessible to all classes with the coming of the railway. People stroll or gossip under the dappled shade of trees or bathe in the shimmering river. The movement of the water, and even light itself, is vividly conveyed through lively and varied brushmarks.

The viewpoint is from on the water, as if we are in a boat. In front of us are nine rowing boats, moored in two rough lines. These fill over half the height of the painting and two thirds of the width on the left, their prows or sterns pointing towards a thin wooden walkway that forms a bridge over the water. Running from left to right, the walkway divides the painting, a little over half way up. It runs from the bank on the left to an island known as the Camembert, which is beyond the right edge of the canvas.

The soft shapes of the leaves and branches of trees fill most of the top of the composition, except in the top right hand corner, where the bright silvery river narrows and curves away under a bright but hazy sky.

Most of the rowing boats have 2 planks across them as seats, and some have a pair of oars resting on them. They are painted in greens and browns with the occasional dash of orange and blue. Although the brushmarks are visible and apparently swift, the boats are strongly defined.

There is murky green water in the shade between them, but the bottom right of the painting is brighter, filled with horizontal, square-ended, overlapping strokes, in greens and blues. These capture the ripples of the water with their contrast of shimmering reflection and dark shadow.

There are figures on the bridge, to the left, two women strolling towards the bank. They are wearing the fashionable long dresses of the day, one in pale blue, one in a pinky grey over a red skirt. This adds an important little pop of colour in a painting of predominantly blues and greens.

To the right, a group of two women and a taller man with a brimmed hat stand gossiping, the central woman has her back to us, the other two are turned sideways towards her. The women wear dark knee length bathing suits, their hair tied up in scarves.

Another figure just left of centre appears to be walking to join the group, their almost black clothing providing a dark vertical accent.

Beyond the bridge on the left, the grassy bank runs down to the water with dabs of multicoloured paint hinting at flower beds. At the top of the bank is a tree painted with a flurry of greens ranging up to a bright warm yellow. Beneath it, dabs of white and dark blue suggest two women seated on the ground in the shade.

Behind the bridge to the left, is a shorter wooden jetty for the swimmers and beyond that the small figures of two more women, one in white, one in pale blue. They stroll on the bank in front of some shed like buildings. Tall straight trees reach up, catching the sunlight, and dark foliage runs along the top. Behind the bridge on the right, dabs of paint convey a crowd of bathers – you can almost hear the joyful sound of splashing and yelling. Beyond them the river flows into the distance into bright sunlight.

This painting is modern in every sense. The scene of contemporary leisure would have been frowned upon by critics who valued subjects taken from Greek myths or the Bible. Monet’s pioneering approach, working swiftly, on the spot to capture a moment of light and modern life would come to be known only a few years later as Impressionism.

Key facts

Details

Full title: Bathers at La Grenouillère
Artist: Claude Monet
Artist dates: 1840 - 1926
Date made: 1869
Medium and support: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 73 × 92 cm
Inscription summary: Signed; Dated
Acquisition credit: Bequeathed by Mrs M.S. Walzer as part of the Richard and Sophie Walzer Bequest, 1979
Inventory number: NG6456
Location: Room 41
Collection: Main Collection
Frame: 20th-century Replica Frame

Provenance

The picture was sold to Bruno Cassirer (1872–1941) by Durand-Ruel in 1901 and passed by descent to Mrs M. S. Walzer (née Martha Eva Sophie Cassirer, 1902-1979), by whom it was bequeathed in 1979 as part of the Richard and Sophie Walzer bequest.

Additional information

Text extracted from the National Gallery’s Annual Report, ‘The National Gallery Report: January 1978 – December 1979’ and supplemented by Isobel Muir.

Exhibition history

2009

Corot to Monet: A Fresh Look at Landscape from the Collection

The National Gallery (London)

8 July 2009 - 20 September 2009
2010

Claude Monet: 1840-1926

Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais

22 September 2010 - 24 January 2011
2014

Monet: The Water Garden at Giverny

The National Gallery (London)

16 September 2014 - 31 December 2015
2016

Monet: The Early Years

Kimbell Art Museum

16 October 2016 - 29 January 2017

Legion of Honor (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)

25 February 2017 - 29 May 2017
2023

A Bath of Colours - Renoir and Monet at the Grenouillère

Sammlung Oskar Reinhart «Am Römerholz»

13 May 2023 - 17 September 2023

Bibliography

1896

Lettres de J. Laforgue à M ***', Revue blanche, 1896, pp. 219-28
1919

E. Waldmann, 'Bremer Privatsammlungen', Kunst und Künstler, 1919, pp. 168-80
1922

G. Geffroy, Claude Monet, sa vie, son temps, son oeuvre, Paris 1922
1948

O. Reuterswärd, Monet, Stockholm 1948
1952

M. Catinat, Les Bords de la Seine avec Renoir et Maupassant , l'école de Chatou, Chatou 1952
1955

M. Rostand, Quelques amateurs de l'époque impressioniste, Paris 1955
1973

K.S. Champa, Studies in Early Impressionism, New Haven 1973
1974

D. Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographie et catalogue raisonné, 4 vols, Lausanne 1974
1977

Y. Taillandier, Monet, Paris 1977
1978

J. Isaacson, Observation and Reflection: Claude Monet, Oxford 1978
1979

National Gallery, 'Pictures Cleaned and Restored in the Conservation Department of the National Gallery, January 1979 - February 1980', National Gallery Technical Bulletin, IV, 1980
1980

National Gallery, The National Gallery Report: January 1978 - December 1979, London 1980
1980

J. Mills and R. White, 'Analyses of Paint Media', National Gallery Technical Bulletin, IV, 1980, pp. 65-7
1981

J. House, Monet, Oxford 1981
1981

M. Wilson, M. Wyld and A. Roy, 'Monet's "Bathers at La Grenouillère"', National Gallery Technical Bulletin, V, 1981, pp. 14-25
1983

R. Gordon and A. Forge, Monet, New York 1983
1983

M. Wilson, The Impressionists, Oxford 1983
1984

P. Kolb and J. Adhémar, 'Charles Ephrussi (1849-1905), ses secrétaires: Laforgue, A. Renan, Proust, "sa" Gazette des Beaux-Arts', Gazette des beaux-arts, CIII, 1984, pp. 29-41
1984

R.R. Brettell et al., A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape (exh. cat. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 28 June - 6 September 1984; Art Insitute of Chicago, 18 October 1984 - 6 January 1985; Grand Palais, 8 February - 22 April 1985), Los Angeles 1984
1984

R. Pickvance, 'La Grenouillère', in J. Rewald and F. Weitzenhoffer (eds), Aspects of Monet: A Symposium on the Artist's Life and Times, New York 1984, pp. 36-51
1985

T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, New York 1985
1986

J. House, Monet: Nature into Art, New Haven 1986
1987

I.D. Gill, 'Composing the Picture: Monet's "Bathers at La Grenouillère", 1869', The Artist, 1987, pp. 25-7
1988

R.L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society, New Haven 1988
1989

F. Arcangeli, Monet, Bologna 1989
1989

R. Kendall (ed.), Monet by Himself: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Letters, London 1989
1989

R.R. Bernier, 'The Subject and Painting: Monet's "Language of the Sketch', Art History, 1989, pp. 298-321
1990

B. Myers, Monet, London 1990
1990

D. Bomford, R. White and L. Williams, Impressionism (exh. cat. The National Gallery, 1990), London 1990
1991

National Gallery, Twenty Great Paintings: A Short Introductory Tour, London 1991
1991

J. Wilson-Bareau, 'Review: Art in the Making: Impressionism', The Burlington Magazine, CXXXIII/1055, 1991, pp. 127-9
1992

C. Lasalle, Croissy-sur-Seine: Les Impressionistes à la Grenouillère, château Chanorier, Croissy-sur-Seine 1992
1992

V. Spate, The Colour of Time: Claude Monet, London 1992
1993

M. Alphant, Claude Monet, une vie dans le paysage, Paris 1993
1993

R. White and J. Pilc, 'Analyses of Paint Media', National Gallery Technical Bulletin, XIV, 1993, pp. 86-94
1993

C. Harrison, 'Impressionism, Modernism and Originality', in F. Frascina et al., Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the Nineteenth Century, New Haven 1993, pp. 167-80
1994

E. Langmuir, The National Gallery Companion Guide, London 1994
1994

Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Impressionisme: Les origins 1859-1869, Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux (exh. cat. Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, April - August 1994; Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 1994 - January 1995), Paris 1994
1994

G. Tinterow and H. Loyrette, Origins of Impressionism, (exh. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), New York 1994
1995

P. Smith, Impressionism: Beneath the Surface, New York 1995
1995

P.H. Tucker, Claude Monet: Life and Art, New Haven 1995
1995

P.H. Feist, 'Waldfrieden und Bilderstreit: Barbizon und der Weg zum Impressionismus', Niederdeutsche Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte, XXXIV, 1995, pp. 182-208
1996

D. Wildenstein, Claude Monet. Catalogue raisonné, Cologne 1996
1996

R. Dorn, 'Söhne und Enkel in Daubignys Garten. Notizen zu Habitus und Gestik, 1859-1890', in Corot, Courbet und die Maler von Barbizon: 'Les amis de la nature', Munich 1996, pp. 49-57
1997

E. Langmuir, The National Gallery Companion Guide, revised edn, London 1997
1997

K. Adler and J. Leighton, London's Monets, (exh. cat. The National Gallery, 12 March - 5 May 1997), London 1997
1998

National Gallery, Places in Art, London 1998
1999

S. Guégan and L. Stavridès, L'abcdaire de Monet, Paris 1999
2000

B. Thomson, Impressionism: Origins, Practice, Reception, London 2000
2000

R. Brettell, Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860-1980 (exh. cat. The National Gallery, 1 November 2000 - 28 January 2001; Van Gogh Museum, 2 March - 20 June 2001; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 16 June - 9 September 2001), London 2000
2001

C. Baker and T. Henry, The National Gallery: Complete Illustrated Catalogue, London 2001
2001

National Gallery of Australia, Monet and Japan (exh. cat. National Gallery of Australia, 10 March - 11 June 2001; Art Gallery of Western Australia, 11 July - 16 September 2001), Canberra 2001
2002

T. Gunnarsson et al., Impressionism and the North: Late 19th Century French Avant-Garde Art and Art in the Nordic Countries, 1870-1920 (exh. cat. Nationalmuseum, 25 September 2002 - 19 January 2003; Statens Museum for Kunst, 21 February - 25 May 2003), Stockholm 2002
2003

R. Rapetti, Monet: Atti del convegno, Conegliano 2003
2004

M. Goldin, Monet: La Senna, le ninfee: Il grande fiume e il nuovo secolo (exh. cat. Museo di Santa Giulia, 23 October 2004 - 20 March 2005), Conegliano 2004
2006

C. Riopelle, Manet to Picasso, London 2006
2006

M. Goldin, Turner e gli impressionisti: La grande storia del paesaggio moderno in Europa (exh. cat. Museo di Santa Giulia, 28 October 2006 - 25 March 2007), Treviso 2006
2006

S.M. Søndergaard, Women in Impressionism: From Mythical Feminine to Modern Woman (exh. cat. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, 6 October 2006 - 21 January 2007), Milan 2006
2007

T.J. Clark, 'The Environs of Paris', in J. House, Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: An Anthology, Berkeley 2007

About this record

If you know more about this work or have spotted an error, please contact us. Please note that exhibition histories are listed from 2009 onwards. Bibliographies may not be complete; more comprehensive information is available in the National Gallery Library.

Images

Insights

What do schoolchildren think of Monet’s ‘Bathers at La Grenouillère’, and what do they want to know about it? For this Picture of the Month, we invited a class of children into the Gallery to take a closer look at the painting, before sitting down with Carlo to ask him all their burning questions.

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Kids’ Art Questions: Monet’s ‘Bathers at La Grenouillère’ | National Gallery

View time: 5:24

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National Gallery Imaginarium

Spark your imagination in a virtual space to interact with our paintings.

Podcast – Stories in Colour

Meet an enigmatic pigment discovered entirely by accident at the start of the 18th century. Its story involves a rogue inventor with an unlikely connection to Doctor Frankenstein, a characterful trio of Johanns, and a renowned Botticelli forgery.

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The world’s first modern synthetic pigment | Stories in Colour Podcast S1 Ep2 | National Gallery

View time: 43:46

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