Croissy, summer 1869

Picture a slack arm of the river on a hot afternoon — a stretch of the Seine just west of Paris, slow-moving and lazy where it widens around a small wooded island. The island sits a few yards offshore, roped to the bank by a wooden gangplank that runs out to a flat floating platform of planks and lattice. The platform is a café and dance hall and bathing spot all bolted together, half-on-the-water, and on any given Sunday in 1869 it is packed with Parisians who have come out for the day in their best dark clothes — clerks, shopgirls, students, soldiers on leave — drinking, splashing, gawking, and trying to get out of the city heat for a few francs. The place is called La Grenouillère, which translates roughly as “the frog pond.” Now stand on the riverbank in front of it and put two easels there, side by side, and behind those easels put two men in their late twenties who are nearly broke. That’s the whole setup of this picture. The rest of this read is what those two men figured out across that summer, while they were standing there.

The two men are Claude Monet (1840–1926) and Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), and the reason they’re at the Seine and not in Paris is a story about a railway. Until about a generation before this, going from Paris out to a riverside village for an afternoon’s bathing was a serious expedition — the kind of trip a working person could not afford the day off to make. Then the Saint-Lazare line, the western train line running out of one of Paris’s big terminus stations, reached the Seine villages — Bougival, Chatou, Croissy-sur-Seine, a cluster of riverside towns about ten miles downstream from Paris where the river loops slowly through orchards and meadows. With the train, those villages became a same-day trip for ordinary Parisians: cheap fare, an hour out, an hour back, a whole afternoon on the water in between. That’s the engine behind this picture. La Grenouillère is one of the most-painted spots of the entire Seine resortboom — the cluster of pop-up cafés and bathing pavilions that the new railway invented along the riverbanks of the western suburbs.

It’s worth being honest about what kind of place it actually was, because the legend has scrubbed it up over the years into something it wasn’t. La Grenouillère was not a respectable bourgeois retreat where polite families took the air. It was rowdy. It was a little dubious. The same year Monet and Renoir were painting there, Napoleon III himself — the emperor of France — had paid a visit (the year before, in fact), which gives you the upper edge of its fame; the lower edge is that everyone knew the bathing girls and their company. It was a working-class pleasure-spot — café, dance pavilion, bathing dock, and pickup joint, all on planks above the river. The dark-suited day-trippers Monet paints on the platform aren’t aristocrats; they’re clerks on Sunday. The whole place hummed with the slightly louche energy of a beach resort with no parents around.

The two painters were not visiting in style either. Monet was holed up in Saint-Michel, a tiny hamlet just upriver near Bougival, with his partner Camille Doncieux and their infant son Jean — the family was nearly out of money and Monet was writing begging letters to friends to send a few francs so they could eat. Renoir was a couple of villages over, in Voisins, staying with his parents because he too could not afford his own place. They had been friends for years, both stubborn, both ambitious, both more or less locked out of the official French art world. So when the weather got warm, the two broke friends did what broke friends in their twenties have always done: they walked. From wherever they were sleeping over to La Grenouillère, where the entertainment was free if you stayed on the bank and the subject matter was endless.

And they did it not once but across the summer of 1869 — over and over, week after week, several painting sessions strung out across the season. (This is the most-repeated misreading of the story, the one to nail down right now: people love to say Monet and Renoir set up their easels next to each other one sunny morning and made these canvases the same day, in a single golden burst. They did not. The side-by-side canvases are the product of weeksof company at the same spot — many afternoons, not one. That’s the difference between a romantic flash of inspiration and a slow, deliberate, summer-long thinking-out-loud between two painters who knew each other’s work as well as their own.)

So that’s the setting. A working-class river resort an hour out of Paris, made possible by a railway. A floating café-bathing-deck called the frog pond. Two friends in their late twenties, broke and ambitious, stuck on the same problem — how to paint a moving, dappled, sun-struck riverside in a way that didn’t kill it. And one slow afternoon after another, with their easels close enough to talk over, they began to figure something out together.