Monet - La Grenouillére (1869)

The Birth of the Broken Stroke

Monet was starving when he sat down at the edge of the Seine in 1869. He had no money for food or candles to see at night. He was painting on stolen time between the hounding of his creditors. Beside him sat Renoir. Together, they weren't trying to make pretty pictures for a gallery wall. They were trying to solve a technical crisis.

Photography had already mastered the stillness of the trees. It could not capture the rippling, liquid chaos of the river. To beat the camera, Monet had to invent a new visual shorthand. He stopped painting objects and started painting the vibration of the present moment. He used slabs of color to represent light hitting the water. These nearly identical compositions by the two friends birthed the Impressionist broken stroke.

The location was La Grenouillère, or the Frog Pond. It was a hedonistic resort where the air smelled of river silt and cheap white wine. The name was a jab at the unescorted women who frequented the floating pontoons. This canvas was actually a sketch for a massive Salon piece that Monet never finished. It captures the final summer of the Second Empire before the Prussian war wiped the era away. It is a world of transience where the flicker of light matters more than the anatomy of the swimmers.

References

• Herbert, Robert L. Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society. Yale University Press, 1988.
• Kendall, Richard. Monet by Himself. Macdonald & Co, 1989.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bain à la Grenouillère. Catalog Entry, Accession Number 29.100.112.
• Wildenstein, Daniel. Monet: or the Triumph of Impressionism. Taschen, 1996.