La Grenouillère

La Grenouillère was a busy bathing and boating resort on the Seine at Croissy-sur-Seine, near Bougival, west of Paris. With its floating café and boats for hire, it was easy to reach by train and drew crowds of Parisians looking for a day on the water. In the summer of 1869 Claude Monet painted here side by side with his friend Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose closely matching view is now in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. Both young artists were very poor at the time and hoped scenes of leisure like this would sell. In a letter of 25 September 1869 to the painter Frédéric Bazille, Monet described his dream of a big painting of the baths and called his studies of the place "bad sketches." This canvas is thought to be one of those sketches, painted quickly outdoors with broad strokes. Working this way, in front of the subject and in changing light, helped shape the style later called Impressionism. The movement took its name a few years later from Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise.