La Grenouillere

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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Keywords: Grenouillere

Work Overview

La Grenouillere
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Date: 1869
Style: Impressionism
Period: Association with Impressionists
Genre: genre painting
Media: oil, canvas
Dimensions: 66.5 x 81 cm
Location: Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden


The Impressionists are the artists in France during the 1870s. It all really started with radical leanings among the painters, who came out in open opposition against academic conventionalism in art.


They wanted to get away from the classical insistence on an enclosed pictorial form, a varnished surface. They wanted their painterly technique to be open-ended, and they refused to delimit their subjects in the accepted way. This approach eventually caught on everywhere in western art, and it has left its imprint on the paintings of the 1870s and 1880s.


Auguste Renoir's La Grenouillère, the frog pond, has all these ingredients - a sketch-like painting, which to contemporaries seemed unfinished, no carved-out details, a glitter of sun reflecting the movements of the water, the boats partly truncated to convey a sense of the passing moment, and the individual details toned down in favour of the overall picture. But, the depiction of reality is still there.


Renoir has depicted an actual moment and life as it is lived, a fragment without any greater depth of interpretation. The theme is a new one: instead of something heroic, we have a casual, trivial excerpt from reality, held together by the lighting. 


At the popular outdoor bathing spot and bar La Grenouillère ("The Frog Pond"), Renoir and Monet, not yet financially successful artists, painted images of middle-class leisure that they hoped to sell to its wealthy clientele. As they worked closely alongside one another, the two simultaneously developed several of the theories, techniques, and practices that would give rise to Impressionism. Both artists painted this scene from this exact vantage point. If Monet's gives a broader perspective and focuses more on the vivid effects of light on the water and surrounding trees, then Renoir's version gives a closer view of the fashionable denizens of the popular resort. Indeed, even when painting nature en plein air, Renoir gave a weight to the human subject perhaps unmatched by his fellow Impressionists.