La Grenouillère

Two broke friends spent a summer on the Seine, easels next to each other — and worked out how to paint moving sun-struck water as paint.

1. 1
   The floating café and its little round island

   Middle distance, dead center — the round wooded island and the wooden gangplank running out to the flat platform

   That fat round green island in the middle is the one locals nicknamed "Le Camembert," after the round French cheese. The narrow wooden gangplank running out from it leads to the rectangular floating platform — the bathing-and-dance pavilion of La Grenouillère itself, where everyone is hanging out. Monet paints the planking as broad horizontal slabs of olive green and warm gray, no fussy plank-by-plank detail; the whole pavilion reads as a flat stage, the people on it as a cast.
2. 2
   Clerks and shopgirls with no faces

   On the platform and along the gangplank, just above center

   Look for the dark-suited figures clustered on the platform and walking the gangplank. They’re Parisian day-trippers in their Sunday best — clerks, shopgirls, students — out from the city by train for the afternoon. They’re painted only a few inches high, as wedges of dark paint with pale highlights, with no faces at all. From across the river in glare, this is exactly what a small crowd looks like — silhouettes, not portraits.
3. 3
   Tilted hulls in the foreground

   Lower left foreground, along the bank — the prows of several boats jutting out

   Those tilted dark wedges with pale ribs along the bottom-left are the bows of rowboats and skiffs tied along the riverbank — long-bellied wooden boats you’d rent for the afternoon. Monet paints them as solid dark masses with little pale highlights along the gunwale (the boat’s upper edge) catching the sun. They are the heaviest, darkest paint in the picture, anchoring the corner.
4. 4
   A few brushstrokes that happen to be people in the river

   Middle distance on the LEFT side of the canvas — small figures in the water, just past the rowboats and over toward the floating pavilion

   Half-immersed in the water on the LEFT side of the picture, well back from the bank and just shy of the floating pavilion, is a small cluster of bathers — men and women in white or dark shirts, standing waist-deep on a hot afternoon. They are easy to miss because they’re small and set back. Each one is only a few broken brushstrokes. They have no faces.
5. 5
   Choppy water in separate dashes of color

   The whole lower two-thirds of the canvas — the entire stretch of river surface

   This is the technical headline of the picture. Look closely and the water is not painted as a smooth pane or a mirror — it’s slate blue, emerald, white, ochre, and dark brown, slashed across in short, separate, mostly-horizontal jabs of unmixed paint. Where the trees on the far bank reflect, Monet doesn’t paint a mirrored shape — he paints continuous horizontal bars in the colors of the reflection. Step back and your eye does the mixing on its own.
6. 6
   Summer foliage in unblended greens

   The upper third — the dense band of trees on the far bank

   The whole top third of the canvas is trees — dense summer foliage on the far bank, painted in unblended greens and yellow-greens with dapples of warm light and pockets of dark shadow stitched into them. There is essentially no sky visible above; the picture’s light isn’t coming down from a blue band overhead, it is bouncing up off the water.