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La Grenouillère (`The Froggery’) was a restaurant and bathing place on a small branch of the Seine at Croissy. It was an extremely popular area because the Railway line from Paris to Saint-Germain, the first to be opened in France, had a station at nearby Chatou. Both Monet and Renoir painted several views of it in 1869 (Monet: La Grenouillère, Metropolitan Museum, New York; Renoir: La Grenouillère, Oskar Reinhardt Collection, Winterthur, Switzerland). Several successful academic painters had houses nearby, and the place was extensively written about, sometimes approvingly, sometimes not so, during the 1860s. It was thought of as a very `contemporary’ subject, and its popularity was confirmed in the year that Monet and Renoir painted it, when it was visited by the Emperor Napoleon III and Eugénie, his wife.

La Grenouillère was a riverside bathing and boating resort, popular among weekend trippers during the Second Empire (1852-1870) and after. It had a floating restaurant which is seen in another of the paintings executed by Monet during his two-month stay there in the late summer of 1869, and it appears in similar works by Renoir often painted sitting alongside Monet. The resort was situated on the Ile de Croissy, facing the left bank of the Seine.

In Monet’s picture, which looks northeasterly, the afternoon light falls from behind the artist–a lighting effect he would have seen in Manet’s studio work. However, although this full-face light is used, it is not exploited for the overall brilliance it gives to more open scenery. Monet only turned to this device in the 1870s. Instead, because of the close proximity of dense, overhanging trees, Monet has produced a study with alternating blocks of dark pierced by patches of dazzling sunlight, resulting in contrasts of light and shade reminiscent of Manet’s work from the early 1860s. The juicy quality of Monet’s paint is also similar to that found in Manet’s work of this decade.

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Claude Monet

Claude Monet

An unexpected facet of Monet’s abilities appears in the skill and grace with which he carried out the always difficult commission of full-length, life-size portrait. M. and Mme Gaudibert of Le Havre were the generous and understanding couple who came to Monet’s rescue in a year of cumulative misfortunes. His family disowned him because of his association with Camille by whom he had a child. None of the pictures he sent in the spring to the International Maritime Exhibition at Le Havre was sold and the canvases were seized by his creditors. In the summer, together with Camille and the child, he was thrown out of the lodgings he took at Fécamp. He came near to suicide. The order for portraits of the Gaudiberts and their purchase of other pictures by Monet tided him over the worst of his difficulties for a time and enabled him to resume the painting he had almost abandoned in despair. `Thanks to this gentleman of Le Havre who’s been helping me out’, he wrote to Bazille, `I’m enjoying the most perfect peace and quiet’. He looked forward again to doing `some worthwhile things’.

The portrait of Madame Gaudibert, painted in a chateau near Etretat, is none the less distinguished for being in a quiet key. The lady’s dress was of that dull satin that offered little scope to the colourist but Monet gives dignity to its folds and adds color–discreetly subdued–in shawl, carpet and curtained background that lightens the effect. This is further enlivened by the touches of white at collar and cuffs and in the design of the shawl. Head and hands are painted with a sensitive simplicity.

Source: http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/monet/early/gaudibert/

Claude Monet

Claude Monet

Monet, Claude (b. Nov. 14, 1840, Paris, Fr.–d. Dec. 5, 1926, Giverny)

French painter, initiator, leader, and unswerving advocate of the Impressionist style. He is regarded as the archetypal Impressionist in that his devotion to the ideals of the movement was unwavering throughout his long career, and it is fitting that one of his pictures–Impression: Sunrise (Musée Marmottan, Paris; 1872)–gave the group his name.

His youth was spent in Le Havre, where he first excelled as a caricaturist but was then converted to landscape painting by his early mentor Boudin, from whom he derived his firm predilection for painting out of doors. In 1859 he studied in Paris at the Atelier Suisse and formed a friendship with Pissarro. After two years’ military service in Algiers, he returned to Le Havre and met Jongkind, to whom he said he owed `the definitive education of my eye’. He then, in 1862, entered the studio of Gleyre in Paris and there met Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille, with whom he was to form the nucleus of the Impressionist group. Monet’s devotion to painting out of doors is illustrated by the famous story concerning one of his most ambitious early works, Women in the Garden (Musée d’Orsay, Paris; 1866-67). The picture is about 2.5 meters high and to enable him to paint all of it outside he had a trench dug in the garden so that the canvas could be raised or lowered by pulleys to the height he required. Courbet visited him when he was working on it and said Monet would not paint even the leaves in the background unless the lighting conditions were exactly right.

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Claude Monet