Chalands sur la Seine

Renoir painted this in 1869, the summer he and Claude Monet set up their easels side by side along the Seine and worked out, touch by touch, the quick broken brushwork that would soon be called Impressionism. Their famous subject that season was the bathing and boating resort of La Grenouillère, all leisure and glitter. Here Renoir looked at the other river. Chalands are flat freight barges, and the Seine below Paris was a working highway crowded with them, hauling stone, sand and timber into the growing city. He gives the scene the same loose, sunlit handling, so the heavy commercial craft sit on water that shivers with light. A year later the Franco-Prussian War would empty these banks of painters. For now the barges just drift downstream in the summer air.