Bathers at La Grenouillère, 1869 by Claude Monet
Canvas Print - 2457-MCL

Look first at the boats. Five or six of them, moored nose-to-shore, their hulls laid in with thick ropes of green and slate paint, edged here and there with a shock of orange along the gunwale. Monet hasn't drawn them so much as swiped them into existence. The seats inside are pale biscuit-coloured slabs, the shadows beneath them nearly black, and if you stand close enough you can see that the lines describing each hull are single unbroken strokes from a flat brush - no correction, no fuss, no second thought.

This is the Seine at La Grenouillère, a bathing and boating resort about twelve kilometres west of Paris, in the summer of 1869. Renoir was there too, at the same spot, painting the same water. Between them the two produced six canvases, and the whole enterprise was supposed to lead somewhere else entirely: a large, properly worked-up picture for the Salon of 1870. Writing to Bazille that September, Claude Monet described the project as a dream and dismissed what he'd made so far as bad sketches. He was wrong, of course, though one can see why he thought it.

The composition refuses every polite convention. No avenue of trees frames the view, no path leads us gently inward. Instead the pontoon walkway slices straight across the canvas at roughly the midpoint, a horizontal bar that stops any comfortable journey into depth. Figures stand on it like punctuation marks - a man in a dark coat, women in blue and rose, a child. Above them the far bank rises steeply and the horizon sits high, crowding the sky into a corner. Everything is pressed toward the picture plane. You feel the flatness before you feel the space.

Colour does the organising work instead. Bottle green and viridian in the boats, echoed in the foliage; cobalt and cream ribboned across the water; small hot flares of vermilion in a woman's skirt, a hat, the trim of a hull. Much of the river lies in shadow, which is odd for a summer scene and strangely lovely - the light comes in bands, skimming the surface rather than flooding it. Dabs of pink and white are all we get for the bathers wading out at centre-right, and they're enough. Two women in bathing costume on the walkway are practically caricatures, three strokes each.

What I find myself returning to is the reflection of the pontoon posts on the right: short vertical smears of dark paint that don't line up with anything above them. Monet didn't tidy it. He recorded what the broken water actually gave him.

The canvas was probably already used before he began, and parts were hurriedly reworked. New flat ferruled brushes and paint in collapsible tubes made this kind of rapid outdoor attack possible at all. Bathers at la Grenouillere, now in London, is a record not of a place but of a morning's looking - noisy, warm, smelling faintly of river weed. Impressionism hadn't been named yet. Here it already exists.