La Mare aux canards

In 1873 Renoir went out with Monet to a farm pond near Argenteuil, the town on the Seine northwest of Paris where Monet had been living for two years. Renoir came back from that one excursion with two canvases and Monet with one, and the results are startlingly alike, which was rather the point of working side by side at the same motif. The branches will not sit still, the surface of the pond breaks into strokes that never quite resolve into water. In December of that same year Renoir, Monet and a dozen others registered a joint-stock company so they could put on exhibitions without asking the Salon's permission, and their first opened the following April. This canvas reached Texas in 1985 with the collection of Wendy and Emery Reves.