La Grenouillere

In the summer of 1869 Parisians took the train out along the Seine to a bathing place near Croissy, with a small floating restaurant that everyone called La Grenouillère, the froggery. Guy de Maupassant would later set scenes of his stories there. That summer Renoir and Claude Monet kept going back to paint it, often side by side, working fast with small, broken strokes. In this version Renoir stays on the bank among the strollers under the trees, while bathers splash in the river and sailing boats slide across the water. Only light patches of colour mark out the figures, the leaves and the glints on the Seine. It is the earliest Renoir in the Pushkin Museum. The Moscow collector Ivan Morozov bought it in 1908. After the revolution his collection was nationalised, and the painting hung in the State Museum of New Western Art until that museum was closed in 1948 and its pictures were divided up.