Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 'La Grenouillère', 1869

In the summer of 1869, Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, still young and penniless, set up their easels side by side at La Grenouillère (‘The Frog Pond’), a popular resort on the banks of the Seine. Known for its floating restaurant, dance halls, bathing area and boat hire, from the mid-19th century the site became a favourite leisure destination for Parisians. ‘I have a dream,’ Monet wrote to a friend, ‘a painting of bathing at La Grenouillère, for which I have made some bad sketches … Renoir, who has been spending two months here, also wants to do this picture’. The two artists were extremely close. They had met in the studio of the Swiss painter Charles Gleyre, where they studied alongside, among others, Frédéric Bazille and Alfred Sisley. ‘We don’t stuff ourselves every day’, Renoir wrote at the time, ‘but all the same I’m happy, because Monet is a good painting companion’. Adding elsewhere: ‘I would have given up many times over had not my good friend Monet [..] bucked me up’. In total, the two artists made six pictures on the spot. This is one of them - a special loan from the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

Here, Renoir depicts the little round islet known as ‘the Flowerpot’ or ‘the Camembert’ and includes a glimpse of the floating restaurant to the far right. Rendered through short, vibrant touches, the scene is bathed in a flickering light. Renoir focuses his attention not on the landscape but on the fashionable crowd, populating his canvas with delightful details: a child plays with a boat, while a dog snoozes in the shade. Human interactions take centre stage. In the collective imagination of the second half of the 19th century, La Grenouillère was widely associated with romantic liaisons and sexual permissiveness: ‘Males and females mix’, wrote Guy de Maupassant in 1881 in La Femme de Paul, ‘There floats an odour of love, and one fights for a yes or a no’. Later in life, Renoir, too, recalled the social dimension of the place: ‘[La Grenouillère] was a perpetual party, and what an assortment of people!’.