A lost tableau, three transcripts

For a picture that ended up doing all that, La Grenouillèrespent most of its first three decades in nobody’s spotlight. Monet did not show it at the 1874 First Impressionist Exhibition (a persistent legend says he did; the museum’s catalogue does not confirm it and you should treat any “Grenouillère was at the 1874 show” claim with skepticism). It did not appear at any other major Impressionist show in the years when it would have mattered most for Monet’s career. It mostly sat. Where, exactly, gets a little hard to pin down, which is appropriate for a sketch its own painter once dismissed as a bad one.

The first owner the museum tentatively names is, of all people, Édouard Manet (1832–1883) — the older Paris painter whose Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe had scandalized the Salon in the 1860s and made him the unofficial elder of the modern-life painters. Manet was Monet’s friend and informal patron and occasionally bought a friend’s canvas off the easel to keep the rent paid. Manet’s role here is uncertain — the Met’s catalogue says “possibly” his — but it fits the story: Monet was broke that summer, broke the next year too, and Manet was the kind of friend who quietly helped. From Manet, the picture seems to have passed to his widow Suzanne Manet (1829–1906) — Suzanne Leenhoff, the Dutch piano teacher who had taught Édouard and his brothers as boys and quietly married Édouard in 1863. Mme Manet inherited her husband’s stock of paintings after his death in 1883. From her, La Grenouillère appears to have moved to Durand-Ruel— the great Paris dealer who became the Impressionists’ agent and lifeline — possibly bought from her in 1886, certainly in Durand-Ruel’s stock by 1891.

Durand-Ruel is the hinge of this story, because Durand-Ruel had a new market in mind. By the 1890s American collectors had begun to discover the Impressionists in earnest, and Durand-Ruel was selling them work as fast as he could supply it. On 27 September 1897, La Grenouillère sold from Durand-Ruel’s stock for 12,500 francs to H. O. Havemeyer — Henry Osborne Havemeyer, the New York sugar-refining magnate, and his wife Louisine Havemeyer, who together were assembling one of the great American art collections of the era. (Louisine in particular was the eye and the engine of the collection; she had been buying Impressionists since the 1870s, when she was still in her twenties and the painters were nobodies.) The painting went to New York. It sat in the Havemeyers’ Fifth Avenue mansion for the next thirty-odd years, alongside Manets and Degases and Cassatts and El Grecos. When Louisine died in 1929, she left the entire collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art — the Havemeyer Bequest of 1929, one of the most generous single gifts in the museum’s history — and La Grenouillère (accession number 29.100.112) joined the Met’s permanent collection. It has been there ever since.

Meanwhile, what Monet himself thought was the real picture — the larger, finished tableau he had told Bazille about in his September 1869 letter — went the other way. Monet did work it up, did submit it to the Salon of 1870, and the Salon turned it down. That rejected canvas passed eventually into the Arnhold collection in Berlin, the great pre-war collection assembled by the banker Eduard Arnhold; when the Nazis broke that collection apart during the Second World War, the painting vanished, almost certainly destroyed. The tableau Monet had dreamed of, that the official system had refused, that the next century’s war had finally killed — is gone. The pochade is famous.

That summer’s work in fact survives in more than two canvases. Renoir’s twin — his version of nearly the same view, painted the same summer from a slightly different vantage on the same bank, set up next to Monet’s easel through that long warm season of work — went on its own journey and ended up at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. And a second small Monet from the same summer, Bathers at La Grenouillère — focused tighter on the bathing pontoon and the figures in the water — is at the National Gallery in London today. Read in that company, the Met picture is not a one-off; it is one of at least three sibling pochades the two friends pulled off the same bank that summer, talking to each other across their easels. There is no master version and no copy. They were the joint product of two painters thinking through the same problem in real time, in the same place, day after day. Treat them like a conversation that happened to leave three transcripts.

So the painting you can stand in front of today at the Met, the small dazzling canvas of the Frog Pond, is a painting its own painter once thought was a scratch — a sketch toward a finished picture he actually made, submitted, lost the Salon over, and lost again to a war. It is a quiet joke at the expense of the tableau-pochade hierarchy that the 19th-century art world ran on. The big polished tableau is dust. The bad sketch named the future. Monet would spend the next sixty years painting Seine surfaces and lily pads and cathedrals and London fog with the method he and Renoir worked out on a wooden platform on the Frog Pond, across the summer of 1869. The pochade kept its strokes visible. It’s still moving.