About this work
*La Grenouillère* is an 1869 oil on canvas (74.6 × 99.7 cm) that depicts "Flowerpot Island" — also known as the Camembert — and the gangplank to La Grenouillère, a floating restaurant and boat-hire on the Seine at Croissy-sur-Seine. The eye lands first on the water, which dominates the lower half of the canvas. Monet gives it everything — short horizontal dashes, broken patches of cerulean and umber, thick touches of white where the light hits hardest.
The foliage above reads almost as a flat backdrop, a dense wall of yellow-green and olive that compresses the depth of the scene into a narrow band between water and sky.
People stroll or gossip under the dappled shade of trees, or bathe in the shimmering river.
Monet concentrated on repetitive elements — the ripples on the water, the foliage, the boats, the human figures — to weave a fabric of brushstrokes which, although emphatically brushstrokes, retain a strong descriptive quality.
In the summer of 1869, Monet was living in conditions of extreme hardship near Bougival, west of Paris. The two works he had submitted to the Paris Salon that year had been rejected, and he was keen to paint a *tableau* that might find fresh mass appeal.
That summer, he and Renoir painted together at La Grenouillère, a slightly raffish resort on the river Seine some 12 kilometres west of Paris.
Monet wrote in a letter to fellow artist Frédéric Bazille that September: "I do have a dream, a painting, the baths of La Grenouillère, for which I have made some bad sketches, but it is only a dream."
He made several oil sketches at the resort in preparation for a large painting 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. What Monet dismissed as mere preparation, history recognised as something else entirely: these sketches were an important step towards Impressionism. The finished canvas he dreamed of is now lost, formerly held in the Arnhold collection in Berlin.
As wall art, *La Grenouillère* carries the particular energy of a summer afternoon that never quite settles — the water in constant motion, the light shifting through leaves. Because of the close proximity of dense, overhanging trees, Monet produced a study with alternating blocks of
