La Grenouillère

La Grenouillère is an oil-on-canvas painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir from 1869, in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (NM 2425). It measures 66.5 by 81 cm and is signed A. Renoir at lower left. The museum received it in 1924 as a gift from an anonymous donor through the Friends of the Nationalmuseum.

La Grenouillère, the Frog Pond, was a popular bathing and boating resort on the Seine at Croissy, near Bougival, west of Paris. In September 1869 Renoir and Claude Monet, both short of money, spent some days there painting the same motifs side by side; Monet's version of the scene was made at the same time. This is one of four views of the site that Renoir painted that year. The Nationalmuseum regards these pictures, with their unmixed colours and sketchy handling, as the first fully fledged examples of Impressionist painting, and describes this canvas as one of its best-known works internationally.

The view centres on the small artificial islet with a single tree, nicknamed the Camembert or the flowerpot, which gangplanks linked to the Île de la Grenouillère and to the floating restaurant and boat-hire establishment seen at right. Men in suits and women in crinolines crowd into its shade, while bathers splash at left and rowing boats lie moored in the foreground. Renoir built the scene from short, quick strokes of colour straight from the tube, so that light through the leaves and reflections on the water dissolve into flickering touches. To contemporaries it looked unfinished, a mere sketch.

The museum also points out that the scene was less innocent than it may now appear. Guy de Maupassant, who called the islet the Pot-à-fleurs in his story La Femme de Paul (1881), described La Grenouillère as a noisy, beer-soaked place of fashionable young men, heavily made-up women and love for sale. The painting once belonged to Renoir's brother Edmond before entering the Swedish national collection.