Artistic goals that Pissarro and Sisley handled in their landscapes were brilliantly implemented in the heavily peopled genre-specific compositions by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. He painted the fuss of Parisian streets and reconstructed the easy festive atmosphere of cafés and countryside picnics. 

In the free and relaxed manner that is typical of impressionism, the artist depicted various life situations as if he spied them by chance. Renoir omitted all details and aspects of everyday life to turn what he had seen into a vivid spectacle of lighting and picturesque reflexes. He stayed away from the traditional modeling of form and precision of contours, replacing them with the finest glazing and tiny volant brush strokes. In this way, he achieved the breathtaking effect of the jewel-like quality of the painting.

Renoir’s work Bathing on the Seine. La Grenouillere belongs to the period of the rise of the impressionist landscape genre. It depicts the popular bathing spot on the Seine in Chatou, near Bougival, known as “la Grenouillere”. This place was depicted in the literary works by Maupassant (“Yvette” and “La Femme de Paul”), and it is where the restaurant of PèreFournaise was located. Jean Renoir, the artist’s son, explained that the name “la Grenouillere” originated from the fact that prostitutes, who spent time there, were then called “grenouilles”, or “frogs”. Many of them became Renoir’s models. Here, together with Claude Monet, Renoir painted his first studies, which laid the foundation for plain-air discoveries and transformed the color array and painting technique of the young artists. Bright patches of clothing, green trees, reflections of light on the water’s surface – all of this makes a unified and vivid harmony of light and movement, while conveying the holiday atmosphere. La Grenouillere fascinates us with the spontaneity of impressions and the energy of powerful brush strokes that bring silvery light to the canvas.