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La Grenouillère

Artist: Claude Monet (1840–1926)
Date: 1869
Dimensions: 74.6 x 99.7 cm
Medium: Oil on canvas
Location: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States

La Grenouillère shows a popular bathing and boating spot on the Seine near Paris, with a floating café, a small round island with a single tree, bathers in the water and rowing boats moored in the foreground.

A closer look

In the summer of 1869 Monet and Renoir painted side by side at La Grenouillère ('the frog pond'), and the pictures they made there are considered the birth of Impressionism. Monet captured the flickering light on the rippling water with short, broken strokes of pure colour, white, blue, yellow and black, placed next to each other rather than blended. The figures are just quick dabs; the subject is the sparkle of a summer afternoon. He described these works as mere sketches for a larger painting, which is now lost.

History of the painting

Monet painted this picture side by side with Renoir at the bathing place on the Seine in 1869. It belonged to Louisine Havemeyer and her husband Henry O. Havemeyer, the New York sugar magnate, who, advised by their friend Mary Cassatt, built one of the greatest collections of French 19th-century painting in America. When Louisine Havemeyer died in 1929 she bequeathed it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, together with nearly two thousand other works.

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