6. Suburban Leisure

Herbert, Robert L.

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6. Suburban Leisure

Robert L. Herbert

Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society

In 1886, when Louis Barron published his book on the environs of Paris, the national census showed that only 20% of the inhabitants of the suburbs had been born in the commune they resided in. Another 24% had been born elsewhere in the suburbs or in Paris, so one could say that 44% were natives of the immediate region....

Author

Robert L. Herbert

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.195-263

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00067.010

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15807

Chapter subject tags:Monet, Claude, 1840-1926Renoir, Auguste, 1841-1919Impressionism (Art)--FranceAsnières-sur-Seine (France)Bougival (France)Grenouillère (Resort : Croissy-sur-Seine, France)Argenteuil (France)Leisure in art--France--History--19th centuryRailroads in art--France--19th centurySuburbs--France--19th centuryMorisot, Berthe, 1841-1895Manet, Édouard, 1832-1883Caillebotte, Gustave, 1848-1894Pissarro, Camille, 1830-1903Sisley, Alfred, 1839-1899Boats and boating in art--France--19th centuryGardens in art--France--19th century

6. Suburban Leisure

Paris smothers, it searches a wider horizon;
Its walls get in the way of spreading out the fulness
Of its ample frocks, it needs the suburbs;
It is pleased to see, without leaving its armchair,
The foliage and the fields . . .

—P. Juillerat, 1861

La Seine river flashes a radiant belt among the vines, and the
villas seem to rise by magic from the nooks in the verdure.

—Edward King, 1868

From one bank of the Seine to the other, one passes suddenly
from the worn suburb to the civilized countryside. The work
is over here, the farniente over there. On one side, flat fields,
factories, earth without shadows; on the other, stylish villas,
luxurious gardens, orchards, and even trees at liberty, bushes
that have not yet been imprisoned.

—Louis Barron, 1886

In 1886, when Louis Barron published his book on the environs of Paris, the national census showed that only 20% of the inhabitants of the suburbs had been born in the commune they resided in. Another 24% had been born elsewhere in the suburbs or in Paris, so one could say that 44% were natives of the immediate region. This is still a striking contrast with the nation as a whole: 84% of French citizens in 1886 had been born in the département of their residence.1 Chevalier 1950, pp. 40–46. The suburbs were growing with a speed that matched that of Paris, and this, of course, meant drastic alterations. In the process of spreading its “ample frocks,” Paris did more than encroach on its neighbors, it entangled them in a web of interchange that altered the appearance and the uses of land, river, road, and people.

The transformation of the suburbs can be crudely summarized as follows. (1) Among the growing numbers who lived in the suburbs, many worked in Paris. These included middle-class people who chose to live outside the city, and working-class people who were able to find lodgings in the less desirable and increasingly crowded areas. One result was that the daily habits and the culture of the suburbs more and more resembled those of Paris. Another was that land was often more valuable for building upon than for agriculture or other traditional uses, and it passed into the hands of entrepreneurs. (2) The suburbs produced many things needed in the city. This had long been true, but the sheer volume of produce changed the face of land and riverbank: intensive farming (some of it now aided by city sewage), and sand, clay, plaster, and stone for Paris’s construction. Dredging and quarrying these materials, and transporting them, altered both land and water. (3) Industry came to the suburbs, some of it from Paris, much of it new enterprises that spread along the waterways, roads, and rail lines. (4) Commerce increased and altered, partly to serve Paris by sending it products, partly to receive Parisian goods, as one of its principal markets. The suburbs constituted a huge, annular city, and much of its commerce served its own burgeoning population. There was a corresponding growth in the traffic between suburban centers. (5) Transport was not only the servant of all these changes, it was the cause of some of the most visible alterations; the railroads actively sought increased business. (6) Parisians coming out to the suburbs for holiday pleasures were a force for change. They were the clients of innumerable cafés, restaurants, dance halls, hotels, bathing and boating establishments, vacation chalets, and pleasure parks. Old buildings were converted to these purposes, and many new ones built, as the former owners gave way to entrepreneurs. In certain areas the number of strollers was so great that the village fair or the beautiful walk along the river were altered beyond recognition.

Much of this shows in impressionist paintings. We see vacationers and pleasure-seekers, and the effects they had on the region, their boats, bathing establishments, cafés, chalets, gardens, and well-worn paths. We see the rivers, roads, and bridges that transported them back and forth. Along the edges and in the distances, but seldom nearby, we occasionally find steaming trains or tugboats, and smoking factories. Villages appear, but not as frequently as the roads and rivers that lead in and out of them. Meadows and gardens are painted much more often than cultivated fields, orchards more than forests. None of these sites is “recorded”; each is interpreted, each is created in art. Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley lived in the suburbs; Caillebotte, Cassatt, Manet, and Morisot owned or rented summer residences near Paris; Renoir spent some summers in nearby villages, as well. They participated in the suburbanization of the area, and they brought back their produce to the Paris market: images of harmonious and productive villages, and of receptive landscapes.

Railroads and Leisure

The region near Paris favored by the impressionists was also preferred by Parisians generally: the area along the Seine that encompassed Asnières and Argenteuil to the northwest, Sèvres and Versailles to the southwest, Chatou, Louveciennes, Bougival, and Saint-Germain to the west, Poissy and Mantes further downstream (Pl. 195). It was served by the Gare Saint-Lazare, and its importance is shown by the fact that 40% of all Parisian rail passengers passed through that one station. Of Saint-Lazare’s 13,254,000 passengers in 1869, approximately 11,000,000 represented suburban traffic.2 Sutcliffe 1970, p. 155. They poured into the streets and grands boulevards to work, to shop, and to enjoy theaters, establishing a vital connection between the city’s most fashionable commercial and entertainment district, and its principal residential suburbs. The growth of the suburbs that reached outwards from the western arc of the capital far outstripped the rest of the perimeter.

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Description: The suburbs west of Paris by Unknown

195. The suburbs west of Paris. Engraving from Karl Baedeker, Paris et ses environs, Leipzig and Paris, 1903, n.p.

Not all the reasons for this pattern of westward expansion are clear, but they include the greatly increased commerce that joined Paris to the Channel coast and England. River and rail traffic transformed the Seine between Paris and Le Havre, and provided some of the impetus for the Parisian exodus, as well as the means of plying back and forth. For centuries Paris had been oriented towards the Mediterranean and Italy, but with the onset of the industrial revolution, it swung around to the north, drawn by the magnet of British industry and commerce. Industry went hand-in-hand with leisure. Not only did the British build the railway from Paris to Rouen (opened in 1843) and to Le Havre (1847), not only did they set up factories for producing steamships and locomotives but, as we saw in the previous chapter, they also brought along their sports and their leisure habits. The British colonies in Le Havre, Rouen, and Paris introduced rowing and sailing which, like racing, led to the adoption by the French of new customs and a new language (le yachting, le rowing). The British love of living close to “nature” also had its effect, and many cottages were built along the Seine, so that one could find an Elizabeth-cottage, with its jardin anglais leading to the river, where a British-built skiff would be moored, awaiting a forthcoming rowing-match. These new customs were grafted onto the French bourgeoisie’s wish to adopt the customs of their aristocratic forebears, whose seventeenth- and eighteenth-century estates had once dominated the same riverbanks.

The opening of the Gare Saint-Lazare in 1837 was itself a proof of the link between the infant rail industry and suburban leisure. The stodgy French business class resisted the railroad, regarding it at first only as a form of amusement, but Emile and Isaac Pereire, disciples of Saint-Simon—the same ones who later developed the Crédit mobilier and built the Grand Hôtel—constructed a line eighteen kilometers long to Le Pecq, across the river from Saint-Germain. Their idea was not to serve industry, but to transport the Parisians who had made Saint-Germain the favorite suburban place for promenades, picnics, and fairs, at the cost of long trips by carriage or riverboat. The surprising success of the new line encouraged the building of a branch down to Versailles, opened in 1839. Because of its strategic placement, Saint-Lazare became the starting point for the main line to Rouen and Le Havre, and eventually was the portal to the whole of northwestern France.

The railroads, by no means passive servants, advertised heavily in Paris and the suburbs. They put up prize money for suburban races, as we saw, and they collaborated with regional sponsors of regattas, dances, and fairs by advertising their attractions and laying on special excursion trains. Cheap fares for weekends and holidays soon made clear the intimate connection of leisure with prosperity for both the railways and the villages. Asnières, Argenteuil, Versailles, Sèvres, Bougival, and Saint-Germain rivaled one another for the Paris crowds, and they revived or expanded their village festivals to attract them. Louis Napoleon included a number of suburban festivals in the list of amusements his government subsidized. Edward King joined a number of other visitors to the Universal Exposition of 1867 who journeyed out to Saint-Germain for one such festival. Fairgoers, “the same types one sees at Longchamp and Vincennes,” walked among many dozens of booths that provided food and entertainment:

Everywhere high poles were erected, bearing the national coat of arms and the imperial letters “N” and “E” interlocked. We passed up through a double lane of peddlers’ booths nearly half a mile long. Here, on tables, were arranged great gilded squares of gingerbread, fancy boxes, imitation Sèvres ware in profusion, and Catholic images…. The canvas booths were all decorated with the “N, E,” and in them were gay hundreds, drinking and singing. The rural theaters, in tents, excited our risibles. There were two separate streets devoted to Thespis.

There were also areas set aside for dancing, for concerts, and for dining alfresco. The attractions of nature were not forgotten, else why would one go out to “the country?”

Inasmuch as there is a fete for every day of the year in France, the French people who had come out with us from Paris cared very little about the festivities, and we finally followed them to a cool nook on the wood’s edge, where we could look off beyond the terrace into the beautiful valley. We rented two of the light cane chairs near by, and listened to the concert by the regimental band.3 King 1868, pp. 194–95.

The thirst for nature’s solace led also to a great deal of building along and near the Seine, from vacation villas to residential enclaves. Le Vésinet was the most unusual case, and it was intimately linked to the railroad. In 1856 the real estate entrepreneur Alphonse Pallu acquired from the Emperor nearly one thousand acres near the station of Le Pecq, in exchange for lands to be added to imperial forests at Marly and Saint-Germain. He sold lots to his garden city, which he formed by imitating Alphand at the Bois de Boulogne. The straight avenues of the old forest were replaced by curving roads, lawns, and artificial ponds, among which the lots were placed. Pallu prospered so much that the railway from Saint-Lazare opened a new station at Le Vésinet in 1862. Pallu was a friend of the duc de Morny, who was among his financial backers. Morny had a number of railroad directorships among his activities, and this might have facilitated his bargain with the Saint-Lazare line: new proprietors at Le Vésinet received four years of free travel to and from Paris.4 Merlin 1967, p. 78, and Catinat 1967, pp. 99–102. A racetrack was inaugurated at Le Vésinet in 1866, a guarantee of periodic social seasons that lent éclat to the new investment community.

Suburban development did not take place without struggle, and one reason for the railroads’ eagerness to cooperate with organizers of festivals, regattas, and races was to dampen the opposition to their mutilation of the countryside. It was a parallel to Louis Napoleon’s use of entertainment to buy off dissent from his dictatorship. Well-organized but futile opposition came from the overland carriage companies and the riverboat industries, which were in direct competition with the railroads. Resistance came also from thousands upon thousands of individuals whose lands were cut through or otherwise changed by the railways, or whose jobs were jeopardized. On 25 and 26 February 1848, roving bands, inspired by news of the revolution in Paris, attacked and largely demolished the railroad bridges at Asnières and Chatou, and the stations at Reuil, Chatou, and Le Pecq.5 Joanne 1856, p. 45; LaBédollière 1861, pp. 33–38. No political revolutionaries these, but ferrymen, towpath workers, owners of towpath horses, employees and proprietors of riverside inns or village stagecoach stops, and others whose livelihoods had been threatened or destroyed by the rail routes. Bridges were favored targets perhaps because they were so visible, certainly because they usurped the role of ferry crossings, and because they served “others,” not local people.

None of this, of course, would be evident in advertising and literature sponsored by the railways. A whole new industry sprang up to provide travelers with schedules, guides, and histories that praised the speed of the new transport, its ability to link formerly backward or isolated spots with the metropolis (cultural, as well as industrial “progress”), and its virtue in taking travelers to beautiful villages, historic monuments, and lovely nature. These books, many of handy purse size, gave employment to artists; among their leading illustrators was Daubigny, the older friend of the impressionists. Merged with the tradition of tourist guides, the railroad books made adroit use of historic sites and natural beauty to enhance travel. The new bridges that leapt across the Seine were represented—the wonders of progress were regularly touted—but most of the illustrations showed quaint villages, famous monuments, and verdant riverbanks. Their texts encouraged stopovers at village festivals and usually listed the dates of regattas, races, and other leisure activities.

From Village to Suburb: Asnières

By the summer of 1856, the popularity of the Sunday festivals at Asnières was so great that as many as 6,000 people crowded the grounds of the old château where they were held. They came in all manner of vehicle, but the largest number used the railroad. Less than ten minutes from the Gare Saint-Lazare, the station at Asnières was the first stop across the Seine northwest of the city. The rail line joined in the advertising for Asnières’s festivals, and opened a special branch office there on Sundays to handle the demand for return tickets. Gustave Doré’s cartoons (Pls. 196, 197), published in 1861 in a study of the city’s environs, poke fun at the morning exodus and the evening return, already notorious by-products of the scramble for leisure that reached a climax on summer Sundays. Asnières in the Second Empire provided Parisians with an astonishing number of outlets for leisure: swimming, rowing, sailing, shooting, riding, picnicking, dining, dancing, promenading, or attending regattas, concerts, cafés-concerts, circuses, fairs, and produce markets (aimed at the Parisians). Each of these was commercialized, and provided employment for seasonal itinerants and for Asnières’s surging population. There were swimming instructors and sailors who taught rowing or simply took passengers aboard excursion boats; renters of several kinds of boat; managers of pigeon shoots and riding stables; vendors of hot and cold food; acrobats, clowns, and singers; individual musicians and whole bands.

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Description: Arriving at Asnières by Doré, Gustave

196. Gustave Doré, Arriving at Asnières. Engraving from Emile de La-Bédollière, Les Environs de Paris, 1861, p. 133.

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Description: Leaving Asnières by Doré, Gustave

197. Gustave Doré, Leaving Asnières. Engraving from Emile de La-Bédollière, Les Environs de Paris, 1861, p. 141.

The convenience of the railway also encouraged Parisians to settle in Asnières, some all year around, others (the word was villégiature) for vacations or for the whole summer. The village underwent the inevitable: its population rose from 1,300, in 1856, to 15,200 by 1886.6 Department of the Seine, Commission de statistique municipale, Résultats du dénombrement de 1896 (Paris, 1899), p. 447. It rose to 24,300 by 1896. The history of its transformation is essentially that of many of the communities along the rail lines west and north of Paris: the search for leisure was one of the principal agents of their alteration. The chief attractions of Asnières in its early heyday were its boating, its Sunday festivals, and its balls, usually held on Thursdays and Sundays. The railroad guides gave pride of place to rowing meets (Pl. 198), which they could praise unstintingly. As for the dances, the guides had to warn the reader in delicate phrases that they were rather like the Bal Mabille, for at Asnières also there were men escaping from their families, women on the lookout, enterprising young dancers strutting their latest, artists and writers who thrived in this less restrained atmosphere, and proper middle-class people (also readers of the guides!) who came to stare at them. The particular tone of Asnières was sounded by the Goncourt brothers in their novel of 1867, Manette Salomon. The painter Anatole moors a boat at Asnières, not far from a riverside cabaret where his friends can readily find him. They all tumble into his boat,

comrades of both sexes, approximations of painters, species of artists, vague women known only by nicknames, actresses from Grenelle, unemployed lorettes, all tempted by the idea of a day in the country and a drink of claret in a cabaret.7 Manette Salomon (Paris, 1867), p. 98.

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Description: Rowing Meet at Asnières by Trichon

198. Trichon after Foulquier, Rowing Meet at Asnières. Engraving from Eugène Chapus, Du Paris au Havre, 1855, p. 11.

We can readily picture the Goncourts’ boating party, for contemporary illustrators had made such outings the stuff of their engravings. In one of 1857 by Andrieux (Pl. 199), a boatload of carefree youth, supplied with picnic basket and wine, has just arrived at one of the islands that dot the Seine near Asnières. Andrieux made sure that we see it as it truly was, a no-man’s land between city and country. On both sides of their mooring are old posts, boxes, and a barrel, the detritus of a well-used shore, while in the fields beyond the other boat that they are hailing are a factory and an abandoned wheel-plow. The men wear a mixture of artists’ and mariners’ costumes, and two of them smoke the plebeian clay pipes affected by city bohemians. The name of their boat, “La Gammina,” is a pun on gamin (street urchin or tomboy), and another of the satirist’s references to the Parisians’ invasion of “nature.”

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Description: Boating at Asnières by Andrieux, A.

199. A. Andrieux, Boating at Asnières, 1857. Engraving. Photograph Roger Viollet.

Informal boating of this kind was very popular by the 1850s, particularly on Sundays when the well-advertised fairs drew great crowds. The fairs were first held on the grounds of the château of Asnières, which was also open on weekdays for paying visitors. Perfect symbol of the middle-class having displaced the aristocracy, the château had been built in the eighteenth century for the marquis d’Argenson, but in 1848 was taken over by a local group who charged admission to enter the park. There one could stroll along the river, enjoy a picnic, or dine in the château itself, converted to a restaurant. On Sundays and special days there were games, music, and dancing. For masked balls and other nighttime dances the château and grounds were festooned with gas lamps, and there were fireworks.

By 1861—the pleasure industry was as volatile in Asnières as in Paris—the château had given way to the Folie-Asnières, nearer to the railroad station. Cafés and restaurants, some with dance floors, proliferated along the river, and in the evenings were thronged with Parisians who adopted extravagant costumes, often modeled on mariners’ clothing, like those seen in Andrieux’s engraving:

From eight o’clock to midnight, the cafés are bursting; beer foams, punch flames, billiards roll, one party follows another, clouds of smoke thicken. The stranger brought there by hazard might think himself at the bar of a masked ball, so great is the singularity of the attire. Some men wear the red shirt of the Garibaldians; others have their peacoats or their sailors’ jackets, striped in all colors of the rainbow. An eccentric cut, lacy arabesques, loud colors, and fantastic trimmings distinguish feminine wear.8 LaBédollière 1861, p. 137.

The physical aspect of Asnières was drastically altered by the pleasure-seekers and those who catered to them. Already by 1856, the old village buildings were being jostled by a motley assortment of cabarets, shops, boating establishments and small apartment blocks. New residential villas were springing up along the banks, both upstream and downstream. Adolphe Joanne, in his guide of 1856, showed little sympathy with the nouveaux riches who were erecting them:

These dwellings, more pretentious than picturesque, affect every form and style of architecture. Over here is a garden of a few square meters, possessing a fountain in a little basin, some statues, a kiosk, and a greenhouse; it is called an English garden. Over there, facades of houses have been erected, some on the model of the Alhambra, others on that of a villa of Herculaneum or Pompeii.9 Joanne 1856, pp. 10–11.

By the 1870s, these villas stretched all along the banks, accompanied by new or remodeled shops and apartment buildings; the grounds of the old château were being divided up for building lots.

Something of the variety of these buildings, like so many weekend revelers in bizarre costumes, can be found in Monet’s The Seine at Asnières of 1873 (Pls. 200, 201). Across the massive shapes of commercial barges we see a disconcerting array of buildings, ranging from the grand manor on the right, with its own gate and lawn, to chunky rental buildings and small, gabled villas. Monet was then living downriver in Argenteuil, and therefore only an observer of bustling Asnières, but other artists and writers had been taking an active role in the village’s growth. In the 1850s, Alphonse Karr, a notable boating and swimming enthusiast, Eugène Chapus, Emile de LaBédolliere and others wrote glowing accounts of the village in articles and books on sports and on the environs of Paris. Henri Thiéry and Adolphe Dupeuty had a success with Les canotiers (Boaters) in 1858, a three-act vaudeville that honored Asnières and its Parisian mariners, and that helped further the vogue for songs about boating. Illustrators and cartoonists published views of the river village, often satirical ones like Doré’s. Musicians, songwriters, and performers took part in Asnières’s weekend and evening distractions, since excursions to the “countryside,” for Parisians, really meant another form of entertainment. In fact, one cannot imagine the rapid growth of Asnières without the services of all these artists, who publicized its charms in words, songs, and pictures, and whose example was followed by others, the “beautiful people” who trailed after the artists. And artists were more than casual visitors at Asnières. Several stars of the café-concert lived in the village, beginning with the famous Thérésa, who built a villa there, Amiati, and Planquette. Living there also were the playwright Armand Silvestre, and the writer and journalist Paul Alexis, friend of Zola and Cézanne.10 Georges Duval, Mémoires d’un parisien, première période (Paris, n.d.), passim, records these and other artists living in Asnières. Alexis became a friend of Signac and Seurat in the 1880s, and both painters worked at Asnières, as did Van Gogh. Seurat’s Bathing Place, Asnières of 1884 (London, National Gallery) gave enduring fame to the location.

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Description: The Seine at Asnières by Monet, Claude

200. Monet, The Seine at Asnières, 1873. 55 × 74 cm. Private collection. Photograph Studio Lourmel.

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Description: The Seine at Asnières, detail by Monet, Claude

201. Monet, detail of The Seine at Asnières (Pl. 200).

Monet’s painting of Asnières reveals more than the patchwork of villas on the embankment. The barges in the foreground are the other side of life along that part of the river, for facing Asnières were the loading docks, warehouses, and factories of Clichy and Saint-Ouen. In the taverns at Asnières, sailors from barges and the small ships that plied the Seine mingled with the weekend mariners and were a source of their “authentic” costume. River boatmen were also employed as instructors by the swimming schools and boat-rental agencies (some of them can be seen in the guide-book illustration, Pl. 198). They were the equivalent of Parisian workers, whose dress and language were incorporated into café-concert songs, and who provided source material for middle-class painters and writers. Monet’s picture offers the same confrontation of classes. The lower half of his composition is taken up by the elongated barges, whose huge rudders (required for manoevering in narrowly channeled current) are painted in loud stripes, prideful signs of their importance on the river. The upper half locates Asnières’s prosperity where it truly was, just across the river from industrial activity.

Of course, all visitors to Asnières saw the contrast between the two banks, but most of them turned their backs on Clichy and represented in their minds, or their art, only the engaging aspects of the suburbs. Once in a while the truth peeped through the conventional accounts of Asnières. In his book of 1861, LaBédolliere noted not just the industry along the Clichy bank, but also “the fetid and black muck” expelled there by the gigantic “collector of Asnières,” the cloaca maxima that dumped most of Paris’s sewage (except for human waste) into the river opposite the village to form a black spoor that trailed down the river all the way to Argenteuil.11 LaBédollière 1861, p. 138. For the story of Paris’s sewers and the Asnières outlet, see Pinkney 1958, pp. 132–42, and Tucker 1982, pp. 151–52. It was not the belated romantics like LaBédolliere, but the naturalists who probed into the truths of life at Asnières, even if they were ugly by prior standards. The Goncourts’ novel Renée Mauperin (1864) begins with the heroine, a young painter, swimming in the Seine just above Asnières, near Saint-Denis. She and Reverchon, who is courting her, are clinging to the ropes of a moored barge as the novel opens. Reverchon is hardly enthusiastic about their surroundings, but Renée, one of the most astonishing women in French fiction, praises the beauty of the industrial and commercial banks, which the authors describe as “dirty and sparkling, miserable and gay, popular and alive, where Nature passes here and there among shacks, work, and industry, like a blade of grass between a man’s fingers.”

Monet, like the Goncourts and other naturalists, was aware that the two banks of the Seine were partners in this locked embrace of work and leisure. In a variant of The Seine at Asnières painted at the same time, he made the contrast even more explicit by situating a sailboat beyond the barges, near the Asnières shore. Furthermore, between 1872 and 1877, the year he completed his series of the Gare Saint-Lazare, Monet made several paintings of the industrial banks of the Seine. However, the tension between city and country was a strong force that Monet could not always accommodate. There was, it turns out, a good deal of LaBédollière in him—one might better say, a good deal of Daubigny or of Corot in him—and in those same years most of his paintings excluded industry and presented the suburbs as a realm of leisure seldom intruded upon by signs of labor. Then, after 1877, all paintings of industry ceased. By 1879, when he moved well downriver to Vétheuil, Paris also disappeared from his oeuvre. In retrospect, we see that in the years immediately following the upheaval of the war and the Commune, Monet had been alert to the dialogue of city and suburb, but that subsequently, like Cézanne, or like Van Gogh, he sought solace by creating landscapes that released him from the tensions of urban life.

With that thought in mind, we have jumped beyond the decade of the 1870s in Monet’s work. For him, as for Renoir, Pissarro, and Sisley, there is much more to the story of painting in the suburbs. Asnières, in the early 1870s, was no longer the preferred haunt of landscapists—it is a measure of Monet’s mutable devotion to contemporary life that he worked there—and a fuller history of leisure in the suburbs, as it appears in impressionist paintings, requires a trip further down the Seine, to the great arc of the river as it flows southwest from Argenteuil and Chatou, and then bends westward by Bougival and Marly before it turns north again. The banks of this undulating river are “the island of France,” the Ile de France, and most Parisians, when they quit the capital, played the game of landing on a distant shore while knowing full well how close they were to the city of cities.

Bougival

There was more than one reason why the impressionists and many other Parisians preferred the environs of Bougival to Asnières. By 1869 Asnières had gone through the cycle of discovery and exploitation, and was no longer chic. Crowded, hemmed in by industry, it had become an appendage of the city. Bougival, Louveciennes, and Marly (Pl. 195) had long since been “discovered,” but still offered a reasonable facsimile of countryside. Here and there along the riverbank were sawmills, loading docks, and chalk quarries, but these were flanked by generous stretches of green growth and were, moreover, pre-modern industries that could be regarded as picturesque. (Sisley and Pissarro frequently painted such sites in the early 1870s.) From Chatou all the way around to Port Marly, the two banks were separated by three narrow islands that were not much built upon, but were well provided with paths, open fields, and woods. Along their willow-laden shores were several establishments which catered to visitors, including the “Grenouillère,” given enduring fame by Monet and Renoir (Pls. 194, 211–215, 217). A new road bridge had been built in 1858 to span the two branches of the Seine between Croissy and Bougival, and new villas were appearing on the riverbanks and inland. These were more elegant than those at Asnières, and many were surrounded by park-like grounds. The whole region had the special advantage, vital to the aspiring bourgeoisie, of its rich historical heritage.

What was left of history at Asnières had been largely engulfed by rapid development, but the slopes of the Seine above Bougival and Port Marly still had a number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century châteaux, and along the river were other reminders of the area’s glamorous past, among them, the famous waterworks between Bougival and Port Marly. Louis XIV had commissioned the waterworks at the end of the seventeenth century to pump water up the steep bank to the new royal château of Marly, from whence it flowed southwest to Versailles. Louis Napoleon had the “machine de Marly” entirely rebuilt in 1858, so the pink and tan building that shows in so many paintings of the 1870s by Sisley was essentially new. It embodied the blending of past and present that was characteristic of the whole region.

Under Louis XIV and his successors, this bend of the Seine had become a dependency of Versailles, its court, and its hangers-on. The Sun King had built the château at Marly to escape from the obligations of state at Versailles. Many noble families had summer residences in nearby Louveciennes (Louis XV built a small château there for Mme Du Barry), and along the river at Bougival at one time were the châteaux of the princesse de Conti, Boissy d’Anglas and Malesherbes. The estates of other notables and of well-connected bourgeois dotted the area from Reuil around to Saint-Germain, always under the lee of the vast royal forests and domains which occupied the lion’s share of the whole region. With the Revolution and its aftermath, many of the great estates were sold, some of their buildings (including Marly) were torn down or extensively remodeled, and their grounds often subdivided for sale. By the middle of the nineteenth century, most of the old families had been replaced by bankers, publishers, financiers, and successful writers; they remodeled some of the old villas or built new ones. The Pereire brothers, whose railway served the region, had a villa at Croissy, and the politician Odilon Barrot held forth at Bougival.

Artists were among those who were active in the transformation of the region, which grew in popularity after 1830. Their paintings and writings circulated its charms among Parisians, and so did their example: by living there, artists confirmed the association of nearby “nature”, with artistic genius and with poetic release from worldly cares. Just beyond Port-Marly, Alexandre Dumas père, at the height of his success in the 1840s, built “Monte-Cristo,” a villa on the slope above the Seine (Pl. 202). Its three stories rose from an impressive terrace. Above, its windows were bordered in decorations patterned after the Renaissance sculptor Jean Goujon, and their keystones bore the images of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Corneille, Goethe, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Hugo. A dry moat separated the villa from the road, where its gate bore a gilded escutcheon that read “Monte-Cristo, historic property” (propriété historique). Subsequently, the playwrights Emile Augier and Victorien Sardou lived nearby, Augier at Croissy, and Sardou at Marly. More modest than Dumas, Sardou affixed the letters M and S to the gateway of his eighteenth-century mansion, confirming that the villa Montmorency was now his. He doffed his hat to ancient history by setting five Egyptian sphinxes along the grande allée of his formal garden.12 Barron 1886, p. 484.

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Description: Dumas's villa 'Monte Cristo' at Port-Marly by Roger-Viollet, H.

202. Dumas’s villa “Monte Cristo” at Port-Marly. Photograph Roger Viollet.

Painters had an equally important role in increasing the fame of the region. In the 1830s, a veritable summer colony of painters was established along the Seine between Chatou and Saint-Germain. Célestin Nanteuil and F. L. Français were among its animators, and their periodic dinners at Souvent’s inn at Bougival were frequently attended by Corot, Auguste Anastasi, Eugène Desjobert, and other landscapists, who decorated their host’s walls with views of the riverbanks and hills. Their fame and their region were partly eclipsed, after 1850, by the rise of Barbizon and its painters, but guide books of the 1850s and 1860s regularly pointed to the artists’ colony in and near Bougival, and led their readers to hope for encounters with notable painters and writers. When the Goncourt brothers visited the aged Célestin Nanteuil in 1855, they could still write that Bougival was “the homeland and the studio of landscape, where every tree, every willow, every fissure of the earth reminded you of an exhibition, and where one walked about hearing ‘This was done by ***, this was drawn by ***, this was painted by ***.’”13 Goncourt 1956, vol. 1, entry for late August 1855.

Thanks to engravers and painters, the landscape itself had entered into history by the Goncourts’ time, with the singular advantage that it recalled the glories of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, so evident at every hand. In his Bougival (Pl. 203), Fernand Heilbuth seated two parisiennes on logs, with an eighteenth-century château in the background.14 The painting is undated, but the costumes are of the late 1870s or early 1880s. See below, note 21. To some, the fashionable women are an intrusive bit of modernity in a Corotesque landscape, but Heilbuth might have purposively inserted the present into the past, for the cut logs seem to be a piece of conscious irony.

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Description: Bougival by Heilbuth, Fernand

203. Fernand Heilbuth, Bougival, c. 1876–82. 94 × 57 cm. Collection unknown.

In an article of April 1869, the connection between nature, idle pleasure, and the appeal of the region’s past was made clear—without irony. The author began with metaphors that treat Bougival as an extension of a fashionable city garden: “The trees form the most agreeable pattern. On the shaded island, one can walk on lawns fresh and gentle to the feet, veritable carpets of greenery.” She or he then continued immediately: “On the heights that crown the village, one has a rich choice among sites of a ravishing picturesqueness and, above all, these woods, these hills, these country seats are full of historic memories, which never spoil anything.”15 G.B., “Les Environs de Paris, Bougival,” L’Illustration 53 (24 April 1869): 267. In the engraving after Charles Weber accompanying the article (Pl. 204), the hill is crowned by the famous aqueduct which received the water pumped from the “machine de Marly.” To the right is Croissy Island (also called “Ile de la Chaussée”), to the left, Bougival, where at one point a low wall encloses a garden that was probably a survivor from the previous century’s large estates. Numerous sailboats and at least one barge are moored along the shore. A fisherman comes down the road, and near the center a man and woman are enjoying the scenery. At Bougival, middle-class vacationers could assert their rights to the privileges of the bygone aristocracy. “Historic memories” (souvenirs historiques) were a kind of portable possession, a representation of the past that could be found in paintings and engravings (hence the word “picturesqueness”), a representation that one could walk through, as though it were a stage set, at Bougival, Louveciennes, and Marly. When Edward King hiked along the hills above the river, in 1867, he not only thought constantly of the building of past glory, but remarked that even the trees near Marly “seemed haunted by some remorseful shade of the old king and his dead century….”16 King 1868, p. 169.

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204. Boetzel after Charles Weber, Bougival. Engraving from L’Illustration, 24 April 1869. Photograph Roger Viollet.

To modern observers, the region is most memorably represented not by Louis XIV, but by the impressionists. Pissarro moved to Louveciennes in the spring of 1869, the presumed date of his Springtime at Louveciennes (Pl. 206). He remained there until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War the following year, and returned occasionally after 1871. Monet took up residence in the hamlet of Saint-Michel, on the heights above Bougival, in late May or early June, 1869. From mid-summer until late September he was joined by Renoir, who spent the period at nearby Louveciennes; his parents had moved there the previous year. Their paintings of the Grenouillère are the best-known representations of the Bougival area and have often been considered the first “impressionist” works (the term was applied to them only five years later). Monet stayed on that fall and winter, and visited Pissarro in December; they both painted the snow-clad road on which the older painter lived. Monet and Pissarro left by early summer, 1870, but Sisley moved to Louveciennes during the siege of Paris. He lived there until 1874, and at nearby Marly until the autumn of 1877. His body of work is the largest devoted to the district, but not the last. Between 1881 and 1884, Berthe Morisot was frequently there with her family, and painted views of the riverbank and village, as well as of her husband, daughter, and maid in their rented villa and garden (Pl. 258).

Pissarro’s Springtime at Louveciennes is apparently the first impressionist painting of the area. The artist places us on the road that runs along the heights of Louveciennes, facing west towards Marly, with Bougival just behind us; below we glimpse the river at Port Marly. In the upper left is the Marly aqueduct, the “souvenir historique” that dominated this bend of the river. It is accompanied, as it were, by another historic reference: the paintings of Corot, whose manner it resembles, particularly in the broadly painted road and in the delicate tones of spring foliage that screens the river to the right. Like many of Corot’s paintings, it combines fresh observation with a view that is unmarked by signs of the immediate present. No tourists are shown, only locals along the road or working by their villas.

Monet’s first painting at Bougival (Pl. 205), done later that spring or early summer, also has visible echoes of the preceding generation. It recalls two painters Monet knew and admired, Daubigny for the composition, Boudin for the sky, and both, for the free brushwork. It resembles also the right two-thirds of Weber’s engraving from L’Illustration (Pl. 204), but there is no need to believe that the print “influenced” Monet. Both illustrator and painter drew from a tradition dating back half a century or more. Monet did not have the illustrator’s purpose of supplying topographical information, and instead was looking for a striking “effect.” He discarded the pathway and tree on the left edge, customary in such river views, so that our eye rushes directly into the agitated sky and its reflection in the river. Because we do not have the expected position on a road that Weber and Pissarro give us, one that allows us to keep a certain distance, we gain a feeling of immediacy, of “being right there,” close to the marshy bank. The large and liquid brushwork also transmits an effect of spontaneity, in contrast to Pissarro’s more refined and detailed strokes. The sunset has tinted some of the clouds with cinnamon reds and purples that resonate against the moist greens of Croissy Island in the foreground. The aqueduct is dramatically silhouetted against the fading light, outcompeting the modern bridge which takes an inconspicuous place below it. Neither has the prominence that Weber grants them, since Monet integrated all features of the river and its banks, and subordinated them to the majestic sky. A rowboat signals the peaceful setting (the steam tugs that plied the river are not shown), and the picturesque houses of Bougival line the bank. Were it not for the bold manner of applying paint, we might think ourselves in an earlier era.

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Description: The Seine at Bougival, Evening by Monet, Claude

205. Monet, The Seine at Bougival, Evening, 1869. 60 × 73.5 cm. Northampton, Mass., Smith College Museum of Art.

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Description: Springtime at Louveciennes by Pissarro, Camille

206. Pissarro, Springtime at Louveciennes, c. 1868–69. 53 × 82 cm. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees, The National Gallery, London.

Past and present cohabit more comfortably in Monet’s Bridge at Bougival (Pl. 207), painted that autumn, after the intervening pictures of the Grenouillère which will be discussed shortly. Less sketchy than the sunset view, more “finished” within the range of the artist’s practice, this astonishing painting—Monet was only twenty-nine—is one of the great landscapes of the era. We are looking across the bridge from Croissy Island towards Bougival, a route that the artist had frequently taken that summer to get to the Grenouillère. Like Pissarro, in his pictures of the region, Monet excludes vacationers and shows the village in an imaginary moment (for he is there) when no Parisian is present. The raking light from the east tells us that it is an early morning in the fall, a non-tourist hour and season when only people in local dress are visible. It is the ideal river village, seemingly remote from Paris. Whether calculated or not, the picture has the comfortable feeling of tradition. By avoiding an angled view of the bridge that would have revealed its modern aspect, Monet makes it seem more like a roadway; the absence of any vehicles contributes to its tranquility.

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Description: The Bridge at Bougival by Monet, Claude

207. Monet, The Bridge at Bougival, 1869. 65.5 × 92.5 cm. Manchester, New Hampshire, The Currier Gallery of Art.

Among the most attractive features of this masterwork are the conjoined effects of color and light. The raking angle of the autumn sun produces strongly lit edges on the left sides of the central tree trunks, the figures on the bridge, the houses at the end of the bridge, the bridge railing, and the tree trunks on the right (Pl. 209). The shadows that sweep across the road are a dramatic indication of the sun’s seasonal angle. They are a rough approximation of the broken reflections of the sky on the river’s surface. Effects of light, in other words, are a metaphor of the paired relationship of river and bridge. The play of sun and shade continues in miniature on the quai in the left distance, where tiny figures walk among the trees. Beyond, morning mist and distance produce a blueish-grey haze in the hollow of the valley.

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Description: Le Quai des Pâquis by Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille

208. Corot, Le Quai des Pâquis, Geneva, 1842. 34 × 46 cm. Geneva, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire.

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Description: The Bridge at Bougival, detail by Monet, Claude

209. Monet, detail of The Bridge at Bougival (Pl. 207).

Monet’s colors, laid down in brushstrokes which are carefully dragged over the surface and which take on a unifying role, have the relatively subdued intensities that suit autumn. The blues of the sky are repeated in the distant hills and are mixed with some red to form the grey-purples and grey-blues of the foreground (from left to right they shift progressively from ruddy to blue tones). Together with the browns and dull greens of hillside, trees, and hedges, they act as a stable matrix for the brighter touches, the orange crowns of the plane trees, the orange and mustard yellows of bank and hedge, the brick red of the long roof to the right. The classical color opposites are embedded in the structure, although reduced in saturation to satisfy the artist’s muted scheme: orange and blue, red and green, yellow and purple.

Color takes on the vital role of integrating a composition that has two nearly self-contained halves, one stretching from the left edge over to the line of the curbstones, the other, from the right edge over to the four trees. Of course the two halves share the central portion of trees and sidewalk, and are framed above by the sweep of the curving hills (which lead to those all-important trees), and below by the shaded roadway. They tend, nonetheless, to separate into two views, and in doing so, they afford us a composition of surprising richness. This device, a composition of two spatial vistas, was common in the work of Hobbema and other Lowlands painters, and can often be found in Corot’s paintings. In Corot’s Le Quai des Pâquis, Geneva (Pl. 208), for example, the two spatial openings are divided by masonry walls and a line of trees. The left side of Monet’s bridge occupies less room on his canvas, but performs the same function. Its rush into space is slowed by the stasis of the figures and by the flattening effect of the four trees, whose trunks do not come closer together as they recede. The same is true of the three trees on the right side, abetted in their effect by the horizontal that joins the top of the hedges with the succession of rooftops. This horizontal works with the central verticals to establish a rectangle in the lower right quadrant which embraces the bridge’s surface, flattening it despite its plunge into the distance. Across the river, the line of plane trees and quai forms another strong horizontal, and the water takes on a symmetrical shape that repeats, in reverse, the configuration of the road leading down to its edge.

Compared with Corot’s view of Geneva, Monet’s picture is full of internal symmetries, repeated horizontals and verticals, and shapes that lie rather flatly on the surface. Corot made use of the alternate light and dark of his diagonal masonry, powerful indicators of receding depth. The foliage of his trees, similarly, is more massive and shifts from light in the foreground to dark, further back. The gaps between his tree trunks diminish with distance, and as a result we cannot flatten them as easily as we do Monet’s. Corot’s foreground slants steadily back to meet the line of trees; his road penetrates space more deeply than Monet’s bridge.

It is not enough to say that these are two different scenes, for each artist could have chosen a view like the other’s. There is always a dialogue between a site and the pictorial structure a sensitive artist establishes for its reception, each helping to determine the other. Corot, like Daubigny, Théodore Rousseau, and other landscapists of his generation, sought out unaltered roadways and riverbanks, and old cities, in preference to those that showed the effects of the urban-industrial revolution. Monet chose a setting that would have been foreign to Corot’s esthetic, a recently built bridge and a vantage point that diminishes the picturesqueness of the village. In its complicated network of geometric shapes, his picture expresses his generation’s wish to impose order and regular intervals over nature. It speaks unwittingly for the Second Empire’s diagrams of control.

This assertion will appear extreme to anyone unused to finding social meaning in the structures of art. However, one of the benefits of twentieth-century formalism has been the demonstration that the forms of music, poetry, dance, and the visual arts embody fundamental beliefs, varying from attitudes towards nature to the struggles between an individual’s subjectivity and concepts of social organization. Monet’s painting of the bridge at Bougival does indeed incorporate some of his generation’s aspirations in the very way he shaped his images. This is difficult for us to appreciate because the agitation of urban life in the twentieth century has changed the way we perceive things, and Monet’s picture now strikes us as a peaceful realm far from a city. Moreover, later paintings, like those of Van Gogh or Jackson Pollock, have altered our sense of pictorial structure, and compared to theirs Monet’s picture appears extremely calm. It is true that the bridge at Bougival was a peaceful spot, and at first glance it might not seem like an appropriate expression of the new Paris. However, Bougival was only a half-hour from the city, and urban sensibilities are clearly at play here. Next to the Corot, Monet’s two openings into depth have a startling effect, and his composition has an abruptness, a lack of traditionally integrated edges and spaces that speaks for the rapidly changing character of the capital.

Monet’s striking geometry was not unique to his picture of the suburban bridge. His Garden of the Princess (Pl. 14) and his Terrace at Sainte-Adresse (Pl. 297), painted two years earlier, also have clearly marked-out planes that rise upward on the surface. It is true that painters of landscape, by the very nature of their work, have always imposed pattern on their settings. French painters were willing to exhibit their patterns openly, unlike British landscapists whose penchant for naturalness resulted in less obvious pictorial devices. Painters in France worked in harmony with landscape architects who had developed a preference for artificial arrangements. Louis XIV’s gardens at Versailles and at Marly have often been likened to the assertion of state power;17 Most effectively by Vincent J. Scully, in lectures and a book now in preparation. these and other formal gardens scattered around the bend of the river near Bougival are one of the reasons why this region appears so thoroughly French. Their kind of order, however, suits the conventions of artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Monet’s patterns no longer observe their careful stagings and deep perspectives. Nor in his compositions is there room for the picturesqueness of Corot and other landscapists of the preceding generation. Instead, he created forms that suited the Second Empire’s sudden and quite ruthless redesigning, not just of Paris, but of the nearby suburbs: highways and bridges that formed new channels of traffic across the countryside; railways that speeded up travelers’ perceptions of village and field; housing developments that brought residential geometries to lands once devoted to agriculture or forest; riverside docks and factories that reshaped the banks of the Seine; steam tugs that gave visibility to industrial power. Equally significant, but less dramatic, are the alterations brought about by canoeists, yachtsmen, bathers, and promenaders, the Parisians, accompanied by painters, who sought escape from the city, but who brought so many of its patterns with them.

The Grenouillère

Croissy Island, which forms the foreground of Monet’s Bridge at Bougival, was ideal for strolling and for painting pictures, and was one of the chief reasons for coming to Bougival. “It’s not even an hour since we left the boulevard des Italiens,” wrote the author of the article accompanied by Weber’s engraving in L’Illustration, “and already we feel far away from Paris.” The peaceful solitude the writer praises was, however, of the Parisian variety, for the text continues:

One hears noises and outbreaks of voices on the island, but these are gay choruses. Life seems to have pushed far away all its dreariness, and shows itself to be good-natured and easy for this population of nomads, of independents who know how to free themselves from the vexations of civilization. For some that only lasts a few hours. For others, that lasts the whole warm season. Fortunate, the latter.18 See note 15.

Monet and Renoir had been among the fortunate nomads that summer, and like the others, they had been drawn to the Grenouillère, the noisiest and most Parisian of the bathing places on the island. It had long benefited from the presence of artists, who as usual were among the vanguard of the leisure-seekers, and who had taken a major role in the development of fishing, boating, and swimming at Bougival. The Grenouillère itself seems to have become the voguish place only in the early 1860s (evidence is scanty before then), but it was the beneficiary of the prior generation’s activity. Already in 1854 it was noted that

The country near Chatou, Croissy, and Bougival is inhabited by a swarm of writers, men and women belonging to the artistic life of Paris. They have the habit of finding one another along the banks at certain hours of the day, sometimes for fishing, sometimes for the pleasures of bathing in open water, which usually takes place towards four o’clock. If, on a warm afternoon of a fine summer day, your spare-time activities direct you towards Croissy Island, … facing the villa of Messrs Pereire, you will find yourself in joyful sporting community with this attractive society. . . .19 Chapus 1854, p. 208.

Chapus then lists a whole host of Parisians whom he credits with popularizing swimming and fishing there: the writers Carcano, Maquet, Wey; the painters Nanteuil, Chenevan, Meissonier; the musicians Tulou, Thomas, Morelli, Chapuis; the dancers Merante, Berthier, Mabille. Some of the same men welcomed boating, also, and only fifteen years later, the article in L’Illustration could declare that “For a few years now, Asnières, the cradle of Parisian rowing, has been dethroned by Bougival.” Two more articles in the same magazine that year, in May and August, touted the attractions of Chatou and of the Grenouillère, confirming that, for rowing and for swimming, this bend of the river had taken preeminence. The August article announced that the Grenouillère had received the accolade of accolades: Louis Napoleon and Eugénie, seldom at a loss for gestures of grand condescension, stopped there briefly in mid-summer 1869, while on a steamboat excursion, and were shown about by the proprietor, Seurin. The author of the article was prompted by this visitation to list many of the historic sites nearby, going back to the pavilion where Gabrielle d’Estrées supposedly entertained Henri IV.20 C.P., “La Grenouillère,” L’Illustration 54 (28 August 1869): 144.

As for Monet and Renoir, already familiar with the region, they hardly needed to be prompted by the Emperor’s visit or the flurry of articles in 1868 and 1869 that helped make the place a distinctive fad. Still, Monet, as we know from his letters, was eager to produce a picture worthy of exhibiting in the next Salon, and the publicity enjoyed by the Grenouillère may have encouraged him to choose the site.21 “I really have a daydream, a painting of bathing at the Grenouillère, for which I’ve done a few bad sketches [pochades], but it’s a daydream. Renoir, who just spent two months here, also wants to do this picture.” (To Bazille from Bougival, 25 September 1869, cited in Wildenstein 1974–85, vol. 1, p. 427.) Monet completed a much larger painting of the Grenouillère, presumably the one rejected by the Salon jury in 1870, and quite certainly the one, known only from old photographs, that disappeared from the Arnhold collection in Berlin during World War II. It is best reproduced in Gordon and Forge 1983, p. 45. Monet’s idea that the Grenouillère painting would make a good Salon entry was vindicated, in a manner of speaking, by the fact that Fernand Heilbuth’s picture of the site was accepted by the Salon jury of 1870. Known from an engraving (reproduced in Catinat 1967, p. 111), it shows the bathing spot with the elements generally disposed as they are in Renoir’s Winterthur canvas (Pl. 215). Heilbuth was a friend of Manet’s, but it is not known if his composition, conservative in structure and modeling, had any direct relationship with the impressionists’ pictures. To reach the Grenouillère, he and Renoir, like other vacationers, had only to go down the steep streets of Bougival, cross the bridge to Croissy Island, and walk along it to the shaded spot. Others summering nearby could follow the same route or be ferried there from several places along the two banks. There were some villas and cabins on the island itself that could be rented by the week or month, and on holidays and weekends, many day visitors came from Paris. It required only a twenty-minute train ride from the Gare Saint-Lazare to Reuil or Chatou, and then a walk of about a mile, or else the services of a carriage. Seurin’s establishment consisted of two old barges moored under the trees, on top of which were built simple shelters for dining and dancing. They were connected to the bank by footbridges, and to the adjacent, artificially rounded island (the “Camembert,” or the “Flowerpot”), which had its own bridge to the shore.

Seurin’s clients seemed happy to make his fortune. Bathing had become a major sport for Parisians before mid-century, and was growing apace. The river was salubrious there, or appeared so, and instead of the fixed bathing structures in the busy Seine at Asnières and Paris, there was a broad span of water under open skies. Boats mingled with the swimmers in frolicsome ways, and Seurin’s dances and regattas were supplemented by those close by, at Bougival and Chatou. Along the bank were rustic tables and seats, simple changing rooms, boathouses, rental cabins, and supply buildings which blended well with the nearby boat repair shacks. Seurin had as many ways of making money as the entrepreneurs of Paris’s cafés-concerts (many of the clients were the same). In his restaurant and among the trees he sold food and drink, and tickets to his balls; he rented boats and bathing costumes; he charged for swimming lessons and for being ferried about; he charged also for using his changing rooms, and for his vacation cabins.22 Maupassant, in his well-known short stories La Femme de Paul (Paul’s Mistress) (1881) and Yvette (1884), treated the Grenouillère as a scandalous place, rife in prostitution. Art historians, citing passages from his racy fiction, have exaggerated the extent to which Seurin’s emporium was a den of iniquity in 1869. True, it was, like the Bal Mabille, a place where the rigors of bourgeois morality were absent, and where amorous play was encouraged by the very nature of communal activity. However, the Emperor’s visit in 1869, and the well-documented presence of families with children, should alone prevent us from converting a liberated environment into an open-air brothel. Furthermore, Maupassant’s stories were written more than a decade after Monet’s and Renoir’s paintings, and by then the character of the place had indeed changed. From Barron 1886, p. 494, we know that the Grenouillère was certainly over the hill by the mid-1880s. We should not be surprised: the volatility of Parisian entertainment virtually guaranteed that a decade’s time would bring about great alterations.

A print of 1873 (Pl. 210) by D. Yon shows a panorama of society at the Grenouillère and introduces us to many of the elements taken up by the impressionists. On the right is a crowd of Parisians in fashionable promenading costume. A child and a dog are present, for family outings were common place at the Grenouillère, and were a staple of contemporary prints of the place (in one painting Renoir shows a dog; in another, a child). The little bridge right of center leads to the Camembert, but its separation from the two floating structures to the rear is not at all apparent. On it are three women, seated on the bench around the tree, and several men, either in bathing trunks or loose bathrobes. On the left, four women bathers in identical rented suits are on the end of a narrow dock, while in the water several are receiving instruction from Seurin’s staff; one holds a baby aloft. Beyond, a man dives from a boat rowed by an urban mariner who sports a cigar and a straw boater. On the bank of Reuil beyond is a small crowd on a dock, where several visitors are being deposited or fetched in a boat. To complete the setting, a carriage and a promenader move along the shore, and a rival dining or bathing boat appears in the upper left.

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Description: Les Environs de Paris: La Grenouillère by Yon, Edmond Charles

210. Miranda after D. Yon, La Grenouillère. Engraving from L’Illustration, 16 August 1873, pp. 112–13.

The illustrator’s job was to supply an abundance of information, in a familiar style that would not offend the readers of his magazine. Monet and Renoir were working in oils, and making sketches, not more finished paintings, so we should expect something quite different. The overall arrangement of the place is, in fact, clearer in their pictures that center on the Camembert (Pls. 211, 212) than in Yon’s print, for they separate the tiny island, its two footbridges, and one of the floating buildings. Their figures, however, are less distinct. Beyond the left footbridge in each painting we see the abbreviated shoulders and heads of swimmers, who share space with the river’s broken surface. Were it not for the image of the safety rope in Yon’s print, we could not have interpreted correctly the smudges that form the vertical post and swaying rope just beyond the bathers.

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Description: La Grenouillère by Monet, Claude

211. Monet, La Grenouillère, 1869. 74.6 × 99.7 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Mrs. H.O. Havemeyer, 1929. The H.O. Havemeyer Collection (20.100.112).

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Description: La Grenouillère by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

212. Renoir, La Grenouillère, 1869. 66 × 86 cm. Stockholm, Nationalmuseum.

Renoir was more of a figure painter, less of a landscapist, than Monet, and he renders the crowd on the Camembert with greater complexity of pose and costume. Despite the sketchy technique, we see the play of light and dark over individual figures, more details of clothing and gesture, and a more artful staging of the group in three dimensions. Monet depended instead on the flat silhouettes of his figures, whom he lines up across the island with little overlapping. Because he was clever at this—the two bathers conversing on the left are quite wittily conceived—we quickly gain an idea of this mix of seated and standing vacationers. Renoir requires more time from us, although we are rewarded with more variety.

Other features of the two pictures confirm the differences between the artists. Renoir fills his canvas with more incident: sailboats on the left, several rowboats beyond the footbridge on the right, a more conspicuous poster on the boathouse, more fully modeled (if still summary) foliage on the far shore, and more prominent willow foliage dropping down from overhead. The latter, mixing with the bunched figures, is a key to the tapestry-like arrangement that emphasizes a busy surface pattern. Monet hollows out a deeper space by placing the Camembert higher up on the surface so as to give a greater expanse of water, in turn more easily read because fewer elements interrupt its sweep. He points the boats toward the center, and also aims the boathouse and the left footbridge inward. Since, additionally, the dangling foliage in the upper-left corner responds roughly to the roof of the boathouse, the whole composition is rather symmetrical, and the elements around the edges create a tunnel for the Camembert (a framework used in the previous generation by Théodore Rousseau and J. M. W. Turner).

At the Grenouillère, both artists were in the midst of finding techniques that would convey an ostensible naturalness of vision. They had to develop new means to communicate what they sought: the effects of spontaneous vision, one that would appear, to be unmediated by prior, arbitrary conventions, although, in fact, it was just as arbitrary, since there is no such thing as a simple imitation of what one sees. They accomplished this convincingly by the mid-1870s, but already here in 1869 they were using several new devices. These would not have seemed “natural” to most contemporaries, since naturalness is a function of familiar artistic conventions, but they were creating a new pictorial language that would eventually supplant earlier ones. Because they were producing sketches, they were less inhibited by established ideas about well-formulated pictures. Both used rather large, separate brushstrokes that could not model forms with the subtlety of traditional means, so the strokes took on different roles.23 In Monet’s Grenouillère, the colors on the surface were brushed over an understructure of large, sweeping, already dry strokes, which do not always coincide with the size or the direction of those that render the images. In the lower left, these subsurface strokes form a sail-like triangle, so it is possible that Monet was using an old canvas. However, he already had the habit of roughing in a composition with large brushes, letting the paint dry, and then working on top of this first layer. By their directions they molded the images they described, and by their hues they differentiated forms as much by color as by alterations of light and dark. The strokes on the boats, for example, follow the directions of the boards that form them; those on the water are mostly horizontals with suitable dips and sways; those on women’s costumes coincide with the massing and disposition of the cloth.

Form-creating brushwork was not by itself new, nor was the use of rather large brushstrokes. Corot, Daubigny, Courbet, and Jongkind all laid in color with visibly separate touches. The difference is that their strokes were usually of closely related color and degree of light and dark, so that from a slight distance a given area or image tends to cohere. Monet and Renoir used more colors and often more saturated tints (including some of the new, industrially derived pigments), so from the same viewing distance, the separateness of their touches remains evident. (Jongkind, by the mid-1860s, had already moved in this direction, but his dabs and streaks were of finer grain and were embedded in a more traditional structure of spatial illusion.)

A careful look at Monet’s and Renoir’s paintings will convince a skeptic that their brushwork was indeed based upon close observation and was not mere slapdash. In the group to the right of Renoir’s Camembert—one is tempted to say “despite,” but, in fact, because of the gestural application, we can see that the bearded man has his hat at a jaunty angle, and stands with his hands behind his back (Pl. 194). His grey trousers are rendered with vertical strokes that veer off at the knee to show the relaxed lower limb. To indicate sunlight on the upper leg, Renoir painted “wet” by dragging some yellow and dull red along with the blueish grey. A brighter patch of yellow at the man’s feet shows the same pool of light coming down from a break in the foliage above. To his right, the striped costume of the woman behind him appears as slanted streaks of white and brick red. By contrast, the woman on the footbridge just above has shorter curved and dabbed strokes that model a different kind of dress; the lower portion is touched with pale pink where the sunlight strikes it. In the V-shaped area (about 3½ inches high) between this woman and the bearded man, the water is captured in undulating horizontals that shift from greenish blue to mixed golden tones near the far shore, a form of color perspective that employs separate strokes of blue, white, blueish white, greyish blue, green, green-blue, yellow, yellow-green, orange, and pink, several of these partly blended.

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Description: La Grenouillère, detail by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

194. Renoir, detail of La Grenouillère (Pl. 212).

The broken strokes in the right foreground of Monet’s painting may be the most remarkable of these innovations of 1869 that resulted from concentrated staring at effects of light (Pl. 213). They form saucer-like hollows in three tones, dark-greenish black, medium-greenish brown, and blueish white. The darkest streaks indicate the farther slopes of the hollows, those that face towards us and that reflect the dense shadows of foliage over our heads. The olive tones are in the bottoms of the dips and reflect the foliage of the opposite shore. The whites mark the near edges of the hollows, those that bend away from us, so that sunlight bounces at an angle into our eyes. The environing blue, of course, embraces the areas that reflect the sky more flatly.

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Description: La Grenouillère, detail by Monet, Claude

213. Monet, detail of La Grenouillère (Pl. 211).

That the two artists collaborated very closely seems certain from the nearly identical motifs that they treated in pairs, first the pictures of the Camembert, then—to judge by the greater assurance with which they handled their improvisations—the two views along the shore (Pls. 214, 215). Collaboration meant sharpening their differences as well as exchanging ideas, and from our familiarity with Impressionism, we can easily see through the shared style to the features that distinguish them. Many of the same disparities are visible in this second pair. Renoir used a wider spectrum of color than Monet, applied with smaller brushes; he gave his figures more varied and complicated poses, although he treated their costumes more summarily than in the first painting. Monet’s picture has fewer colors, and is dominated on the right by whites and blues, elsewhere by greens and blues, relieved by touches of red. His penchant for striking surface geometry appears in the stark horizontal of the footbridge which not only divides the canvas into two halves, but almost darts off the right edge, restrained there by the skiff which touches its end, and by the leftward facing man. He and the two bathers (borrowed from the other picture) loom up in silhouettes against the glaring water, their flatness punctuated at regular intervals by the spots of dark hair that crown the heads of the swimmers. Monet’s flotilla of rental boats is the most astonishing feature of his composition (Pl. 217). Renoir’s boats take on the more discreet role of edging our eye back along the shore, but Monet’s, jammed together, activate the foreground with assertive flair. He makes them cut back sharply into depth, but he terminates the group on the right so as to leave a rectangle of water that flattens out. This tension between depth and surface is repeated in each of the foreground boats, because our high vantage point, combined with Monet’s broad bands of paint, makes them float up on the canvas despite their strong angles.24 Monet’s structure, more immediately grasped than Renoir’s, has usually been praised as more “progressive,” because it seems to foretell the twentieth century’s love of rapidly encompassed and geometric surfaces. It is also seen, often unconsciously, as a more aggressive and “masculine” organization, compared to Renoir’s softer one. In male-dominated art history, that makes him the superior artist. These assumptions and value judgments, thoroughly embedded in the history of modern art, are virtually impossible to set aside, but one could as easily argue that Monet’s compositions lack subtlety, or that Renoir’s look forward to Vuillard and Kandinsky. A less value-oriented comparison would distinguish Renoir’s greater variety of hue and his tapestry effects from Monet’s chunkier vision. (It is the same order of tension that later characterizes Degas’s compositions.)

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Description: Bathers at La Grenouillère by Monet, Claude

214. Monet, Bathing at La Grenouillère, 1869. 73 × 92 cm. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees, The National Gallery, London.

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215. Renoir, La Grenouillère, 1869. 65 × 93 cm. Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur.

The Grenouillère pictures assumed pivotal roles in the development of Monet’s and Renoir’s Impressionism. For Monet, the lively setting seems to have inspired more daring paintings than his first work of his season there, The Seine at Bougival, Evening (Pl. 205), a stock landscape brought partly up-to-date. In some ways his bathing scenes go back to his Déjeuner sur l’herbe of 1865 (Pl. 178), but an appreciation of Parisian life has intervened, and the social activity at the Grenouillère was not the stiff affair of the earlier project. The plunge into the active, less restrained society of the Grenouillère brought out a more saucy challenge to tradition. This brashness was toned down during the next two or three years. That autumn, for example, when he turned to The Bridge at Bougival (Pl. 207), he made a more finished painting whose color is relatively muted and whose brushwork is more integrated. Then in Holland two years later, in a painting of people enjoying the banks of the Zaan river, Garden House at Zaandam (Pl. 216), he treated figures, boats, water and people with very broad, rather flat paint that owes much to the Grenouillère campaign, although in the Cézanne-like awkwardness of his middleclass figures we sense that the posiness of the Déjeuner has not yet been overcome.25Wildenstein 1974–85, vol. 1, no. 138, correctly identified in the Ortiz-Patiño sale, Sotheby’s (New York), 9 May 1989.The lessons of the Grenouillère canvases were nonetheless vital to Monet, as he was subsequently to demonstrate in pictures done in Holland in 1871 and in Argenteuil the following year.

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Description: Garden House at Zaandam by Monet, Claude

216. Monet, Garden House at Zaandam, 1871. 54 × 74 cm. Formerly J. Ortiz-Patino. Photograph courtesy of Thos. Agnew & Sons.

Much the same can be said about the place of Renoir’s Grenouillère paintings in his development. Before 1869, most of his canvases of men and women out of doors were essays in the monumental figure, clothed and unclothed. More fully contemporary in subject were his paintings of Parisians and visitors in the gala year 1867 (Pls. 8, 9), and his skating picture of 1868 (Pl. 147). The latter is a precedent for the Bougival compositions both in the informality and inventiveness of the sketch and in its subject, a wintertime parallel to his bathing crowds. Even if we allow for the change to a more strongly colored summertime scene, however, the Grenouillère paintings mark a large step in the direction of heightened chroma and rough-grained brushwork. He never forsook ambitious figure paintings of a more traditional kind (he showed his Bather with Griffon in the Salon of 1870), but the Bougival sketches were an intensive colloquy with contemporary life that invigorated his art. The nude bathers that preoccupied him all his life were a way of claiming traditional subjects for modern art, by investing them with a sense of palpable air and colored light. The swimmers and the costumed crowd on the Camembert, the reflections of sky, foliage, and people in the water, the garishly colored boats and the slender footbridges—all these features, combined with sunlight, air, and water, those insubstantial but vital realities, inspired in Renoir, as in Monet, a lively inventiveness that pushed his art towards the fluttering, polychrome surfaces of the mid-1870s.

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Description: Bathers at La Grenouillère, detail by Monet, Claude

217. Monet, detail of Bathing at La Grenouillère (Pl. 214).

The modernity of Monet’s and Renoir’s paintings of bathing at Bougival did not quite cover over all allusions to the past, although they are more latent than manifest. For the painters, as for the swimmers, to go out to Bougival was to claim a right to a modern-day Isle of Cythera, to the same riverbanks that the upper class had enjoyed in the eighteenth century. The pictures of 1869 were further steps in the artists’ adaptation of the present to the continuity of social life and of picture-making embraced in the fête galante and the déjeuner sur l’herbe. Contemporary writers used the phrases “picturesque” and “historic memories” to describe Bougival, and we now see that the same terms can be applied to Monet and Renoir. There is, after all, a connection with Watteau (Pl. 137), and with Corot, Français, and other intermediaries who garnished Souvent’s inn at Bougival with evocations of the eighteenth century.

These remarks fairly characterize the internal evolution of Renoir’s and Monet’s art, although their contemporaries had little awareness of it.26 Manet owned Plate 211, but it is not known when or how he acquired it, nor whether others saw it while it was in his possession. Monet exhibited one of his Grenouillère pictures seven years later, in 1876 (probably the lost painting formerly in the Arnhold collection), and another in 1889 (Pl. 214); Renoir seems not to have shown his at all. Only at the turn of the century, a whole generation after they were painted, did more frequent reproduction and exhibition let them enter the active arena of the history of art. The work of Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, and other Fauves, stimulated by the impressionists and founded also on themes of leisure and hedonism (Derain and Vlaminck painted at Chatou), eventually made the Grenouillère paintings appear to be more complete pictorial statements than Monet and Renoir had intended. Then we, in our turn, later in the present century, have so prized spontaneity and daring, that we have elevated the Grenouillère compositions to a high place in the canons of early modern art. Bathing, boating, and dining-out in the “country” are among our desires, escape from urban cares is our yearning, bright colors and sensual movement are our solace and our stimulation. These are all explanations for the fame of Renoir’s and Monet’s sketches of the Grenouillère.

Artists’ Trains and Bridges

The paintings at the Grenouillère marked short-lived episodes in the careers of Renoir and Monet. Like the holiday-makers they painted, they were transients at Bougival, although, unlike the other visitors, they were working on their own kind of suburban produce, with their city market in mind. At Bougival, as elsewhere in the region, the continuity of their vision was provided by Parisian culture: they took Paris with them, wherever they went. This is true also of Pissarro and Sisley, despite the fact that after 1870 they settled in villages near Paris for longer periods. In the work of these two artists, even so, the signs of the visitor are prominent. They were especially fond of the roadways that led into or out of villages, and of towpaths and embankments, the axes of movement along the river.

After the turbulent period of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, the lives of the impressionists settled into similar patterns. Like many well-to-do Parisians, they spent most of their summers in nearby villages, or at sea resorts. The Manets owned property in Gennevilliers, Caillebotte at Petit-Gennevilliers, the Cassatt family, by 1880, at Marly; Morisot frequently summered at her sister’s, in Maurecourt. In the 1870s, Monet had brief periods of residence in the city, but lived in villages along the river: Argenteuil from 1872 to 1878, then at Vétheuil. He was constantly back and forth to Paris, where his major painting campaign, appropriately enough, centered on the Gare Saint-Lazare (see Chapter One).

Train in the Countryside (Pl. 218) is the first canvas, as far as we know, on which Monet placed a train. Its connection with leisure is clear, for in the foreground is a park.27 Wildenstein 1974–85, vol. 1, no. 153, dates the picture 1870–71, but the palette and touch agree instead with the works done in the first months at Argenteuil, in 1872. Wildenstein speculates that the site is somewhere along the line to Saint-Germain, but it is possible also that it was in the Bois de Boulogne, on its eastern edge, facing the talus that formed the city’s fortified wall there. The Circular Railway ran just behind the embankment on its own high elevation, before it curved over to cross the Seine on the Auteuil bridge. In 1878, Sisley painted the double-decker trains crossing that bridge, so we know the quaint cars ran along that line. Along a raised embankment steams a train with its double-decker cars, the upper part open on the sides for the hardy travelers who braved cinders and weather to take advantage of the elevated position and cheaper seats. Monet’s horizontals and verticals, cushioned by the gentle undulations of foliage, smoke, and shadows, commemorate the integration of the railway with the well-tended landscape of the Parisian perimeter. The train moves behind a thick screen of foliage, a harmonious alliance because Monet minimized the train’s mass and integrated it with the horizontal run of his foliage. In the foreground is a public park where seven strollers have sought the shade, while in the open, a lone man protects himself from the summer sun with a parasol (Pl. 219). Nearby stands a woman, also with parasol, and a child. The three sunlit figures are standing stock still, facing us. Whatever the origins of Monet’s idea (perhaps similar figures stared at him as he painted?), the curious result is to make us feel like train travelers looking out upon a passing scene. We are viewers being viewed, and since the train passengers are over there in the distance, the whole picture from front to back seems to be about the pleasures of sightseeing in what the French would call “nature.”

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Description: Train in the Countryside by Monet, Claude

218. Monet, Train in the Countryside, c. 1872. 50 × 65 cm. Musée d’Orsay.

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Description: Train in the Countryside, detail by Monet, Claude

219. Monet, detail of Train in the Countryside (Pl. 218).

About a year later, after he had settled in Argenteuil, Monet again painted a train (Pl. 220). This time he minimized foliage, and exposed the impressive railway bridge, which sweeps in dramatically from the left edge. Instead of a rolling lawn, the foreground consists of a homely pathway. Two boats are under sail, and the day is sunny and calm, yet we have the impression that Monet is not so much celebrating leisure as asking us to marvel at a wonder of modern engineering. Painters of the previous generation would not have shared his enthusiasm. Corot and Daubigny, from whom Monet learned so much, would never have painted this bridge, because for them it would have been an obtrusive sign of the encroachment of Paris on the countryside. They used the railroad to go back and forth to the suburbs, but they painted older bridges precisely to distance themselves from the city. In his Bridge at Mantes (Pl. 221), Corot chose a structure that was admirable because it was centuries old, and had resisted progress. His view is mediated by the swaying tree trunks and the grassy slope, in contrast to Monet’s urbanized foreground. The only activity on the river is the pirogue of the local boatman, although the pollarded tree trunk and, of course, the bridge, speak for the ways in which humans have bent the riverbanks to their uses. It is not untouched nature that Corot presents, but a pastoral image intended to remove us from present time.

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Description: The Railroad Bridge, Argenteuil by Monet, Claude

220. Monet, The Railroad Bridge, Argenteuil, 1873. 58.2 × 97.2 cm. Private collection.

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Description: The Bridge at Mantes by Corot, Jean-Baptiste Camille

221. Corot, The Bridge at Mantes, c. 1868–70. 38.5 × 55.5 cm. Musée du Louvre.

We do not see Monet’s bridge by looking through tree trunks, but abruptly, directly. Instead of a restful slope, there is a scruffy pathway in the foreground, and along its edge, a retaining barrier that makes so little concession to traditional railings that it looks to us like a modern highway buffer. Monet used this piece of utilitarian design to help speed the eye along the near shore, and this makes all the more dramatic the opposing thrust of the bridge. The more comforting arches of older spans have been displaced by a linear structure which was built in units on the ground, then hoisted into place atop the impost blocks that surmount the piers. The bridge hurtles in from the left edge and cuts sharply across the canvas in a way that would have been anathema to Corot. He introduced his bridge on the left edge of his canvas with a zone of shadow and reflection that weds it to the water, and he made the Y-shaped tree join the sides of the bridge’s first arch and mimic the pier of the second bridge, just beyond.

In all art that is capable of moving us, structure interprets subject. Monet’s painting is a homage to the railway not just because it represents a new bridge, but because its composition has the framework of modern engineering. The opposing lines of the embankment barrier and the bridge are snapped as tightly as the chalked lines of a builder (Pl. 225). From the two men our eye passes to the nearby sailboat, then to the second set of piers, and on to the other sailboat, an oblique line that penetrates space at a sharper angle than that of the bridge. The alternating light and dark of the men’s clothing is repeated in the piers of the bridge and in the two sailboats, a rhythmic contrast that aids the march of our eye off to the right. The two men are at the nexus of a whole network of crisscrossing diagonals. They stand on the axis of the shoreline, an angle which their shadows accentuate. Their heads just touch the other shoreline, which is another of the slanting lines of this cat’s cradle design. As though there were invisible strings in their hands, they take position within the lines of the composition, lines whose arbitrariness is the embodiment of modernity. This is because those lines are actions that embrace humankind’s ability to surmount nature, to span her chasms and waterways, to impose unnatural patterns upon her for their own purposes. Their modernity resides in their very “unnaturalness,” now made the servant of a new naturalism.

The bridge in Monet’s picture was only about two years old, rebuilt after its demolition during the Franco-Prussian War. The nearby highway bridge had also been destroyed and rebuilt, and Monet painted it many times from 1872 to 1874 (Pl. 244). Consciously so or not, his renderings of the bridges are symptomatic of the mood of post-war reconstruction and the rebuilding of France’s wounded pride.28 For this, as for so many aspects of Monet’s work at Argenteuil, see Tucker 1982, pp. 70–76, and passim. Although the association with post-war rebuilding had been noted before, Tucker is the first to have shown that the bridge pictures are limited to Monet’s early years at Argenteuil, that his later subjects there are very different, and that these groupings should be interpreted in the light of Monet’s shifting attitudes, as well as of the history of the town itself. Pissarro and Sisley, in the same years, painted bridges and commercial activity along the waterways near Paris, as did their contemporaries Adolphe Hervier, Stanislas Lépine, and Armand Guillaumin. Taken together, these paintings interpret a mood of secular optimism that had had little counterpart before 1870, when such subjects were rarely found in these artists’ work. Monet’s two men, looking out over the water, are like the men pictured in nineteenth-century books devoted to the marvels of modern construction, figures that stand both for the builders (they are men, not women) and for the ordinary mortals called upon to witness promethean triumphs of industry. The illustrations in railway guides (Pl. 222) often show a bridge chopped off at both sides to heighten the sense of its leaping across the river (and the page!). This homely severity was allowable in graphic arts, but not in painting. Monet need not have been “influenced” by these illustrations, but they are closer to him than the Japanese prints so often touted by art historians. Like Degas and Manet, he turned his back on many of the rules of the fine arts, and adopted some of the formulations of journalistic illustration because of a common devotion to contemporary life.

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Description: The Railroad Bridge at Bezons by Unknown

222. The Railroad Bridge at Bezons. Unsigned engraving from Eugène Chapus, De Paris au Havre, 1855, p. 14.

Argenteuil was an appropriate choice for Monet’s exploration of modernity. Only nine kilometers from Paris, it was a bustling town with substantial industry, and also a beneficiary of the Parisians’ thirst for leisure. The iron bridge that Monet painted was made at a large iron works only a few hundred yards away, and his boats were among many moored at Argenteuil, the center of yachting in the Paris region. The constant coming and going between the town and Paris is signaled by the two trains on the bridge. One heads to the left, coasting into the station that is only one street from the river’s edge; the other, having just quit the station, is picking up speed and therefore belching smoke as it heads towards the capital. Above, the windblown smoke and the clouds form a canopy of blues and pinkish-whites that help relieve the starkness of the bridge. The wind that blows the smoke upriver also propels the sailboats and they, too, alleviate the severity of the bridge. The near boat beats upwind while the other runs in front of the strong breeze. They move in opposite directions, as do the two trains, and their paths cross under the span, caught there along the artist’s organizing diagonal.

The parallel harmonies of city and country, and of work and leisure, are symbolized in the smoke and the clouds, a peaceful blending of man-made and natural vapors. “Peaceful” to us, we should add, from our vantage point in the twentieth century, but Monet’s art was still too daring an embrace of modernity for most of his contemporaries. Industrial subjects were not considered proper for “fine art,” particularly in images of the countryside. Barbizon art, only then coming into general acceptance, had reinforced the traditional association of rural villages with the unchanging past. Monet did have predecessors, however. In the previous generation, the Saint-Simonians had preached the virtues of industry, especially of transport: canals, steamships, and railways. One of Pierre de Lachambeaudie’s utopian poems, “Smoke of Altar and Smoke of Forge” (Pl. 223) admonishes those who believe that only the fumes of incense should rise in the sky. Factory smoke has the same right. “Mix together fraternally,” says God, “For work is equal to prayer.” Transport had a special attraction for the Saint-Simonians because, by linking remote areas with modern centers, it helped overcome ignorance and isolation, and it led towards universal social harmony. “Steam accomplishes these poetic dreams,” reads another Lachambeaudie poem, in which he also attacks the romantics, mired in their private agonies, who would fight industrial progress:

Poet, may your lute call truce to pain;

Truth will soon supplant the dream,

And reality will be marveled at.29 “Steam,” in Fables (Paris, 1855), p. 203.

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Description: Smoke of Altar and Smoke of Forge by Unknown

223. Smoke of Altar and Smoke of Forge. Unsigned engraving from Pierre de Lachambeaudie, Fables, 1855, p. 86.

In the Second Empire and Third Republic, former Saint-Simonians like the engineers Eugène Flachat (designer of the Gare Saint-Lazare’s train sheds) and Prosper Enfantin were foremost in railroad construction, so what was once a radical credo became absorbed into the working philosophy of advanced capitalism. Earlier, the Pereire brothers, also Saint-Simonians, had had the foresight to join industry and leisure when they opened their rail line to Saint-Germain, and we saw that subsequently the railroads emphasized leisure, tourism, and the pleasures of nature, in order to win customers and parry the opposition to their march across the countryside. Monet’s Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil therefore aligned him with the progressive elements of the middle class, although it would require two decades or more before the rest of the bourgeoisie applauded his paintings.

Monet’s painting of the bridge did not mean a wholesale adoption of the industry which was then rapidly expanding at Argenteuil. By comparison with Corot or Daubigny, who could not bring themselves to paint railroads, Monet seems like a spokesman for the changes affecting the once-rural villages along the Seine. However, there is abundant evidence that at Argenteuil he screened out much of local industry. He showed factories only at a considerable distance, with very few exceptions, or else he avoided them entirely. The examination of another bridge picture will reveal why his reconciliation of nature and railroad is a surprisingly complicated issue.

For The Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil [from upstream] (Pl, 224), done a year later, Monet moved upstream along the same bank, going under the bridge to arrive on its other side. Our point of view is part way up the slope of foliage-covered earth which supports the tracks above; below us, unseen beyond the makeshift fence, is the pathway at river level. The more we compare the two pictures, the more we realize how unalike they are. In the later picture the bridge darts dramatically back into space to give us a sense of the movement of the train, but here the mound of foliage cushions the juncture with the picture’s edge (which, anyway, is not the left edge where our eye enters). We are on a verdant bank, no longer on the barren riverside of the earlier work, and so our associations are with the colorful natural growth here and on the shore opposite. This goes some way towards integrating the bridge with its setting, instead of emphasizing its separation.

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Description: Railroad Bridge, Argenteuil by Monet, Claude

224. Monet, The Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil, 1874. 54.5 × 73.5 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection.

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Description: The Railroad Bridge, Argenteuil, detail by Monet, Claude

225. Monet, detail of The Railroad Bridge, Argenteuil (Pl. 220).

Natural forms, in other words, are arranged by the artist so as to frame his dynamic bridge and train. There is simply much more greenery here than in the other painting, and a much stronger palette that creates the impression of a strong, natural light. The sun seems almost visible in the yellows of the piers and the smoke, and the oranges of the far shore contrast strongly with the blues of the water. The sailboat is tacking against the wind, which must be fairly strong because it pushes the train’s smoke sideways. By stressing that sun, wind, and sailboat are all going along the axis of the river, at right angles to the bridge, Monet reinforced the symbolic confrontation of the boat, symbol of leisure, with the train. (It was a very deliberate choice, for a variant of this composition, and a small study of the same site, show no boat at all.) Together the boat and the railroad stand for the modern suburb which has relinquished its agricultural role to the pressures of industry and of urban leisure. Both boat and railroad represent the new forces that were radically altering Argenteuil, forces that disrupted traditional life in this river village, creating wholesale changes in the use of the river and its embankment.

Artists must distill their pictorial ideas so as to make striking statements, and Monet eliminated a great deal in order to concentrate on the harmonic opposition of boat and train. Were we able to stand where Monet places us in the later picture, we should realize how artful his choice of view was. Behind us and to our left were several large factories, and along the shore immediately to our left were industrial loading docks and warehouses. Argenteuil was a major river port, but Monet uniformly avoided the industrial uses of the river there. He did paint several views of the industrial banks of the Seine, near Rouen and near Asnières, but at Argenteuil the images that expressed the town and its relationship to Paris were the train, as it charged over his head, and the opposed, calm movement of the sailboat. They stood for the reconciliation of city and country, of industry and leisure, of railroad and river, of metal and foliage, of industrial steam and natural wind. Steam and wind are forces that move things, and motion is the essence of change.

It is Monet’s willingness to accept change, even to glorify it, that distinguishes him from Renoir, Sisley, and Pissarro. This is not a measure of superiority, but simply a characteristic of his art. One could well argue, for example, that Pissarro’s Railroad Bridge at Pontoise (Pl. 226), painted about 1873, is just as beautiful, just as great a painting, as either of the Monets. It shows a similar railroad bridge cutting across the Oise river. At the right end of the span, barely noticeable, a locomotive sends up a plume of smoke. The contrast with the two Monets is obvious. Not only has Pissarro chosen a morning of glassy calm that eliminates all movement, he has also put the bridge in mid-distance to integrate it with the site. It runs parallel to the surface, not at a dynamic angle, and it is partly screened by a tree as well as joined to the village at both ends. The change represented by the bridge is minimized, although we recognize its modernity in the straight lines it superimposes over the picturesque old town.

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Description: The Railroad Bridge at Pontoise by Pissarro, Camille

226. Pissarro, The Railroad Bridge at Pontoise, c. 1873. 50 × 65 cm. Private collection. Photograph by kind permission of The Lefevre Gallery (Alex Reid & Lefevre Ltd.).

It might be objected that Monet frequently painted Argenteuil’s highway bridge from a similar distance (Pl. 233), and therefore that the comparison is flawed. However, a road bridge (moreover, of an earlier design) does not at all have the same symbolic meaning, and Monet invariably showed pleasure boats nearby. Pissarro never made dynamic, close-up views of a railroad bridge, nor did he paint sailboats or skiffs. He painted other views of Pontoise and its railroad bridge, some of them showing a puffing train, but they are kept at a distance and their activity is subordinated to the townscape. Monet’s pairing of pleasure boat and train is the kind of concentrated symbolism of modernity that the older artist avoided.

Monet’s railroad bridges can also be distinguished from Sisley’s paintings along the Seine. More than Monet, Sisley painted scenes of artisanal and industrial work along the canals and rivers near Paris: barges at anchor, the loading or unloading of produce, boats under repair, men dredging sand. Although he occasionally painted pleasure boats, he avoided the symbolic juxtaposition of industry and leisure that marked Monet’s pictures. He was drawn principally to the ordinary preoccupations of local people and the boatmen along the river. They are regularly shown in small scale, so that their activity characterizes the riverscape to which, nonetheless, they concede the dominant interest.

In The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne of 1872 (Pls. 227, 228), one of his finest canvases, Sisley gives us a portrait of this bridge and river village upstream from Argenteuil, closer to Paris. The highway bridge slices into the picture with justifiable drama. Road bridges lacked the theatricality of the railway, but they often had a remarkable effect on small towns. A rail bridge serves long-distance interests more than local residents, and its tracks, being dangerous, are blocked off from adjacent streets. A highway bridge serves villagers as much as travelers, and its approaches are accessible. Opened in 1844, the Villeneuve bridge joined Saint-Denis to the village, ending its relative isolation.30 Merlin 1967, p. 80. By rail or horse-drawn bus, one could go north from Paris to Saint-Denis, a matter of only seven kilometers, and cross the bridge (which rested on the island of Saint-Denis) to Villeneuve. The satellite community of Saint-Denis benefited from access to the village, one of several examples of a suburb within the suburbs. Parisians, however, also went to Villeneuve for day trips and vacations, and many built villas near there. At the same time, Villeneuve was a river port for Gennevilliers, the village in the center of the bulge of land circumscribed by the northern loop of the Seine, as it bends around to Argenteuil. Manet’s family was among those who owned land and a home at Gennevilliers, and Berthe Morisot spent the summer of 1875 nearby. She also painted Villeneuve (Pl. 229), a buttery sketch that emphasizes boats more than the span across the river, although she stresses the structure’s thin, hovering quality and thereby reveals it as a suspension bridge.31 Morisot’s painting, not previously identified with Villeneuve, once belonged to Mary Cassatt; it was sold at Christie’s, New York, 16 May 1986, no. 253.

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Description: The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne by Sisley, Alfred

227. Sisley, The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne, 1872. 49.5 × 65.4 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ittleson, Jr., 1964. (64.287).

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Description: The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne, detail by Sisley, Alfred

228. Sisley, detail of The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne (Pl. 227).

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Description: Villeneuve-la-Garenne by Morisot, Berthe

229. Morisot, Villeneuve-la-Garenne, 1875. 26 × 50.5 cm. Collection unknown. Photograph courtesy of Christie’s.

Sisley’s Villeneuve picture is all idleness—or nearly so. It is an idyllic summer day, only a year after the violent end of the Commune in Paris. A local boatman is under the bridge, with two vacationing women as passengers: one person’s leisure is another’s work. The boatman might not be a Villeneuve resident, for boat-rental agencies were dotted all along the river, but his mariner’s costume, in proximity to the moored boats, suggests that he was stationed at the bridge. Under its shadow is a pair of visitors, the man in shirtsleeves, the woman retaining her hat. To their right, part way up the bank, stand two women in the plain clothing of villagers. All the figures are along the bridge’s axis, and nearly everything else reflects its role. The olive-green color of its shadow on the water is found in the horizontal dabs on the water and on the embankment they reflect. The main shadow frames the seated couple, and the simulacrum of the sun-pierced railing runs skittishly down to the water. Above, the grey tollhouse partly blocks our view and makes more gentle the rush of the bridge into the village. The large building to the right, more than once added to, probably acquired its odd corner structure when the bridge road was cut through. Its pink awning proclaims it a store, and the green swatch (either painted boards or a tarpaulin) apparently shelters the interior from the sun; the same green patch shows in Morisot’s painting.

It is these many touches of local life that distinguish Sisley’s conception from Monet’s view of the railroad span at Argenteuil from upstream (Pl. 224). Monet’s bridge is headed towards Paris, not into the town, and only one sailboat is there to characterize local activity. In his picture we are looking away from the village towards the two principal agents of its transformation. In Sisley’s, we see a public bridge and holiday-makers, but they invite us into the village, there to contemplate many features of its relation to the bridge. There is no comparable painting in Monet’s oeuvre. His highway bridge (Pl. 244) runs towards Argenteuil, but we see screens of foliage, or angled views downsrteam or upstream, not the village. Moreover, Monet’s paintings of the bridges have an order of distilled geometry and concentrated symbolism (the two cannot be separated) that is quite foreign to Sisley.

Like Pissarro, Sisley can make us feel that he lived among his villagers along the Seine. He succeeded more than Monet in displacing himself from Paris and in creating an environment of harmony: one ideal of the seeker-after-leisure. Monet was always the visitor who treated suburban villages like so many outdoor studios, seldom penetrated by local life, except for its artifacts. Perhaps this is why his painting of sailboat and bridge (Pl. 224) looks less like Sisley’s Villeneuve, and more like his own view, four years later, of the tracks of the Gare Saint-Lazare, looking up at the Pont de l’Europe (Pl. 28).

Sailing at Argenteuil

Argenteuil, about four miles downriver from Villeneuve, was so closely identified with Monet that it derived much of its subsequent renown from his pictures. (Painters have often performed this role for French villages: Millet and Rousseau for Barbizon, Daubigny and Van Gogh for Auvers, Gauguin for Pont-Aven.) He had settled there at the end of 1871, not long after his return from a Wanderjahr that had taken him to England, to avoid the Franco-Prussian War, and then to Holland, where he sat out the Commune and its aftermath. The paintings of the railroad bridge at Argenteuil that we have already looked at were not, in fact, typical of his lengthy campaign there, devoted mostly to his garden, village streets, nearby fields, boats on the river, and the banks of the Seine downstream from the railway. Out of about 175 surviving paintings done at Argenteuil, 75—by far the largest single category—are devoted to the boat basin adjacent to the highway bridge (Pl. 230) and to the area near the Ile Marante, which splits the river into two channels downstream from the village.

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Description: Schematic map of Argenteuil

230. Schematic map of Argenteuil. Adapted from Paul Tucker, Monet at Argenteuil, New Haven and London 1982, pp. 188–89.

The Seine widens at Argenteuil, giving yachtsmen more water and steadier breezes than at Asnières or Bougival. Near the village, the river is over 200 yards wide, and for about three miles upstream from the Ile Marante its bed, straight and deep, is unobstructed by islands. Since Argenteuil was less than half an hour from the Gare Saint-Lazare, it was readily reached by the Parisians who kept boats there and by those who came out to watch them. Joanne’s guide of 1870 reported 200 sailboats moored in the Argenteuil basin; many were privately owned, others could be rented by the hour or the day.32 Joanne 1870, p. 645. In Monet’s Argenteuil Basin Viewed from the Highway Bridge (Pl. 232), the viewer is positioned well above the water, looking downstream. The shore here, opposite Argenteuil, lacked a village center and consisted of a scattering of small shipyards, plank docks, and vacation villas, lumped together as Petit-Gennevilliers. The promenade along the embankment was one of the principal vantage points for viewing the frequent regattas. In the distance is the southwestern edge of Argenteuil (the Ile Marante is out of sight around the bend). Looming up in the lower right is the floating building of a boat rental agency; moored alongside its gangplank is Monet’s own studio boat, whose stocky blue cabin rises above its neighbors.

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Description: The Argenteuil Basin (Le Basin d'Argenteuil) by Monet, Claude

231. Monet, The Argenteuil Basin Viewed from the Highway Bridge, 1874. 53 × 65 cm. Bloomington, Indiana University Art Museum.

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Description: The Argenteuil Basin by Monet, Claude

232. Monet, The Argenteuil Basin, 1872. 60 × 80.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay.

If we were able to cross the bridge and walk down the other bank towards the factory chimney that smokes on the horizon, and then turn around to face the highway bridge, we should have the view that Monet had painted two years earlier (Pl. 232). The vantage point is much lower down, inviting us to walk into the picture. A late afternoon sun stripes the foreground, where we find several promenaders walking along the pathway and three women seated, facing the water. In this picture the river is a narrow zone between the sky and the green bank, but a surprising amount of activity is crammed into it (Pl. 233). It is a well-pondered composition, full of many decisions, taken slowly, and therefore a more “finished” painting than the panorama from the bridge. Two white-clad women, one of them standing, are in a rowboat conducted by a seated mariner. Nearer to us, inconspicuous in their grey garments, are two women who hold parasols aloft. They stand on the bridge leading to a bathing establishment that floats there; further along the shore are other bathhouses. To their right a steamboat sends up a plume of purplish smoke, whose tones are almost matched by the undersides of the clouds that billow out over the site. Nearby, conforming to the horizontal arrangement that regulates the bottom third of the composition, are two sailboats, one picked out with a green hull, the other with a red pennant. Beyond is the road bridge. It had been rebuilt that year, following its wartime demolition. (When Monet had arrived at Argenteuil the previous winter, it was still under scaffolding, and he had so painted it more than once.)

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Description: The Argenteuil Basin, detail by Monet, Claude

233. Monet, detail of The Argenteuil Basin (Pl. 232).

A month or two later in 1872, Monet turned around on that same spot and looked in the opposite direction to paint The Promenade, Argenteuil (Pl. 234). It is early autumn, no longer a busy summer day on the Seine. Two sailboats glide slowly or wait for a breeze on the river’s main channel. The Ile Marante is behind them, with the mouth of the secondary channel opening on the far left. To the right are two factory chimneys, an imitation Louis XIII château, a church steeple that gives the false impression of being attached to it, and several low factory buildings. Further to the right are a few promenaders among the trees, through which another later afternoon sun is casting long streaks, colored simulacra of tree trunks, yellow on the grass and orange-red on the dirt road (which is rendered lavender-grey by the shade). The Sunday quiet of this peaceful afternoon is abetted by the absence of smoke from the tall chimneys, a deliberate decision on the artist’s part, for in other paintings he shows them smoking, or else he suppresses them entirely, as though they did not exist. In this idyllic picture, sailing has none of the confrontational energy of the views of the railroad bridge (Pls. 220, 224), although the factories, focused by the pathway, are a reminder of the other side of Argenteuil’s activity.

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Description: Argenteuil by Monet, Claude

234. Monet, The Promenade, Argenteuil, 1872. 50.5 × 65 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection.

Surely these two paintings of the Argenteuil embankment live up to the ideal their promenaders sought, a well-ordered suburb where nature and humans met in agreeable harmonies. Neat, smokeless chimneys and a puffing steamboat integrate industry with the landscape in a pleasing way, for no actual work is hinted at. Men are mostly absent (only one male promenader), presumably at their employment in Paris, allowing their women and children this display of leisure: nonwork, nature, and family are the things that a man labors for. Pictorial harmony and social harmony are merged—it is Monet’s unwitting goal—in a setting that permits middle-class Parisians to let light, air, and river sports soothe away anxieties of the city, where work and workers must be regularly confronted, and where memories of the recent war, the workers’ commune, and its bloody suppression, are still disturbing.33 Tucker 1982 gives an excellent account of the postwar mood that provides a context for Monet’s pictures of Argenteuil, and Clark 1985, a perceptive analysis of why labor and work are not shown in those paintings. Although his pictures were unappreciated in 1872, Monet was using echoes of Barbizon art to induce a vision of pre-war serenity. His summertime painting, with its active sky and saturated greens, should remind one of Daubigny, and his autumn view, with its air of arcadian stillness, of Corot.

Of course there is hardly any untouched nature in either painting. Well-groomed banks and well-groomed pictures equally reveal humankind’s patterns superimposed on nature, whose warts and bumps are largely suppressed. If we looked for the symbolic center of this perfect world, it would be the sailboats that, more than anything else, characterized leisure at Argenteuil (rowing was enjoyed there, also, but less importantly than at Asnières and Chatou). Except for the steamboat in Monet’s painting, there is no sign of the extensive industrial traffic that plied the river here. Elsewhere, in these same years 1871 to 1874, he painted commercial shipping (Rouen, Le Havre, Amsterdam), but he recognized that pleasure craft were the vessels that symbolized Argenteuil. In truth the major changes along these shores had been brought about by the pleasure boats, so the artist was right to give them first place in a modern landscape. They represented the inroads of Parisians who were transforming the village. The changes were not yet as drastic as at Asnières (later they would become so), but new villas were springing up along the shore of Petit-Gennevilliers and spreading out from the old center of Argenteuil on the other bank (Pl. 235). The influx of weekend and holiday visitors meant a great increase in the number of cafés, restaurants, and boating establishments, and wholesale changes in the local economy.

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Description: Houses in Argenteuil by Monet, Claude

235. Monet, Houses at the Edge of the Field, 1873. 54 × 73 cm. Berlin (West), Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz.

The history of sailing and rowing is just as instructive for the study of Parisian society as the history of horseracing. Indeed, they are closely connected. Like organized racing, pleasure boating (canotage) in France grew from emulation of the British. The British colonies in Le Havre, Rouen, and Paris, so vital to the industrialization of France, introduced competitive rowing and sailing in the 1830s. By the mid-1850s, Asnières became the headquarters of the Cercle nautique (Nautical Club, also called “le Boat-Club” and “le Rowing-Club”), devoted principally to rowing by from one to eight oarsmen, and Argenteuil became the seat of the Cercle des voiliers de la basse Seine (Sailing Club of the Lower Seine). Regattas were organized by these and other clubs at many spots along the river, from Charenton, southeast of Paris, around to Bougival and Saint-Germain. Their meets were spaced out over the warm months, regulated by inter-club committees the way the Jockey Club watched over rival racing seasons. Rowing meets were occasionally held in the center of Paris, as well as in the lake in the Bois de Boulogne, for enterprising politicians (the Emperor among them) and businessmen quickly learned the attraction of water sports. River villages sought regattas for the glory and the money, and there was even a Société de canot-concert (Society of Boating Concerts), founded in 1853 to give nautical concerts along the Seine. The Yacht-Club de France had its offices on the grands boulevards, and it was presided over by the Minister of the Marine, under the Emperor’s sponsorship.34 Paris dans sa splendeur, vol. 2, 1861, p. 32, and Joanne 1870, p. 645.

The clubs based at Asnières and at Argenteuil initially formed an élite apart. Until the 1870s, when membership rules were liberalized, their upper-class and British tone was guaranteed by their directors, who included the ubiquitous duc d’Albuféra, the prince de Joinville, the comte de Mos-bourge, the writer Alphonse Karr, and various British diplomats and businessmen, among them, John Arthur, Lord Cowley, and William Short. At first membership was limited to the wealthy, for early chroniclers left no doubt: to compete with the British in industry and politics meant that the French had to adopt gentlemen’s sports. Eugène Chapus began his book of 1854, Le Sport à Paris, by pointing to the value of these “aristocratic diversions,” which, by stimulating courage, agility and fortitude, prepare men for high social careers:

If the English early on understood the importance of the practice of sports, and if they perfected some of them so as to leave behind all rival nationalities, there are yet some in which the French follow them closely….

The brilliant devotion to sport implies a grand and aristocratic existence in a peaceful and continuous enjoyment of its prerogatives, and it is for this reason that its development has long been restrained among us. In France one attacked too much all the things that breathe an air of nobleness….

Chapus then congratulates France on the establishment of the Second Empire (“the society of élites is being organized, reconstituted”), for now the way is open to match the British:

There are regatta societies in all English cities, boating clubs whose membership consists of young men of good and noble families …. Boating in England is not a game, it is a serious occupation, an education that has its disciples, its centers, its clubs, its statutes, its rules, its support.35 Chapus 1854, pp. 3–4, 194.

Boating was therefore one strand of the web of social, political, and commercial relationships that was being rewoven in Second Empire France. The new entrepreneurial society signaled its cross-Channel debts in its vocabulary: le sport, le turf, les jockeys, and le rowing, les skiffs, and les yachts. Its fabric was patterned on the British model, one that led the rising middle class to adopt leisure activities heretofore limited to the upper class. Boating had the advantage of being a relatively costly and conspicuous form of leisure that marked off its devotees from the lower classes. It is true that struggling artists and sales clerks could rent boats, but they were kept in their place because they did not own their own craft and were excluded from membership in the prestigious boat clubs. To paddle about at Asnières or on the lake in the Bois de Boulogne was as much water-borne glory as the average Parisian could aspire to.

The flâneur, of course, turned up his nose at the plebeian Sunday boaters, and hobnobbed instead with the more privileged sportsmen. Alfred Delvau, in his book on the pleasures of Paris, refers to many gentlemen sports figures and names dozens of their winning horses and prize boats. The central chapters of his book follow this order: cafés, restaurants, theaters, circuses and popular shows, balls, social clubs, horse-racing, nautical sports. The upper-class man-about-town made his appearance at all of these and had to be knowledgeable about each, so it is no surprise that Manet, who was one of them, came out to Argenteuil in 1874 to celebrate boating. The Argenteuil basin had risen from a modest to a clamorous fame after 1871,36 Sections on boating in guide books of the early 1860s mention Argenteuil briefly or not at all; Asnières dominates their accounts, as does rowing. By the end of the decade, Argenteuil and sailing are given important place, e.g., Joanne 1863, pp. 616–18, and Joanne 1870, pp. 644–46. and Manet was ever on the qui-vive for the social institutions that characterized his time. He spent much of that summer at his family’s place in Gennevilliers and frequently came over to Argenteuil, only two miles distant. Renoir was also there that summer, visiting Monet as he had the previous year, and there was a lively exchange among the three.

In Monet Painting in his Studio Boat (Pl. 236), Manet shows the artist seated in the bow of the boat he adapted as a studio. Our vantage point can be found by looking at Monet’s picture of the basin from the highway bridge (Pl. 231). We are located at water level in the foreground of that space, looking in the same direction. In the distance are the chimneys on the southwestern edge of Argenteuil. Monet, shaded by the kind of awning used for marine cafés (see Pl. 251), rests his palette on his right leg, casually propped up on the port gunwale. His wife looks on from the doorway of the tiny cabin while he debates another touch on his canvas. He has been looking over his left shoulder for his motif (Pl. 237), a view along the shore that Manet has recapitulated in the upper-left corner of his own canvas. The oar that projects on the right shows Monet’s normal mode of propulsion; the stubby mast supports the awning, not a sail. His boat is not like the pleasure craft that he painted, but it is the vessel of an itinerant whose mobility it facilitates (he got the idea from Daubigny, who plied the Oise and the Seine in his Botin). Manet presents him not as a resident of Argenteuil, but as a painter-sailor, dressed in an artist’s blouse and tie, and crowned by the same sportsman’s hat that he gave to another of his boatsmen at Argenteuil (Pl. 239). The seriousness of Monet’s preoccupation should not disguise the fact that he and his muse, like Andrieux’s boaters at Asnières (Pl. 199), had come out from the city to enjoy these shores.

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236. Manet, Monet Painting in his Studio Boat, 1874. 82.5 × 104 cm. Munich, Neue Pinakothek.

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Description: Sailboats on the Seine at Petit-Gennevilliers by Monet, Claude

237. Monet, Sailboats on the Seine, Argenteuil, 1874. 54 × 65 cm. By permission of The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Gift of Bruno and Sadie Adriani.

In addition to the painting of Monet in his floating studio, Manet did four other boating pictures that same season. For Boating (Pl. 238) Manet posed his wife’s brother Rodolphe Leenhoff, wearing the colors of the eminent Cercle nautique headquartered at Asnières: white shirt, white flannel trousers, straw hat with blue border.37 LaBédollière 1861, p. 135. Such a costume guaranteed distinction from a real river boatman (whom bourgeois amateurs had imitated), so too did the presence of a chic female companion, who has the same hat the artist’s own wife wears in two seacoast paintings of the previous year.38 On the Beach (Musée d’Orsay) and The Swallows (Pl. 282). The model in Boating has not been identified. When Manet later showed Boating in the Salon of 1879, he matched it with In the Conservatory (Pl. 183), for it is a suburban equivalent of that other composition. The same kind of couple could be found in fashionable visiting costume in a classy city greenhouse and in boating outfits at Argenteuil. Both couples are “doing nothing” in the parlance of working people, and both are shown in the restrained attitudes of society’s leaders. (The contrast of Manet’s boating pair with the couples in Andrieux’s print, Pl. 199, is one of upper class versus middle class.) Neither title nor attributes of Manet’s Boating refer to a specific place, for the composition has an emblematic simplicity. The Japanese prints which it certainly reflects—it was noted at the time39 Huysmans 1883, “Le Salon de 1879,” p. 36. Modern historians have pointed out that Leenhoff originally held the rope in his hand, and that by moving it to the boat cleat, Manet flattened the composition in a japoniste manner. However, the original position of the rope would have produced an even flatter zig-zag; the change opened out a space between helmsman and sail. No commentator seems to have noticed the curious piece of wood that Manet painted along the bottom of the composition, slanting up towards the right. Is it perhaps an oar laid athwart the boat, or the edge of a piece of decking (unorthodox structure, in that case)? Furthermore, the boat is an old-fashioned kind, like the one on the left in Argenteuil (Pl. 239), not one of the sleek yachts that Monet and Manet otherwise painted, with their curving decks and cockpits. The significance of this has also escaped comment.—assisted the artist in distilling his images. Water, sail, and boat are cut off abruptly by the frame, and each is reduced to the minimum, just enough to make us read “boating” instantly. The rather shallow space is activated by the way the man’s body and limbs twist to the right.

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238. Manet, Boating, 1874. 97.2 × 130.2 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Mrs. H.O. Havemeyer, 1929. The H.O. Havemeyer Collection. (29.100.115).

Argenteuil (Pl. 239) shares much with Boating, but it does not require many moments to see that it projects a quite different mood. For one thing, it lays out a more complicated assortment of images and cannot be read instantly as an ideographic condensation of boating. Argenteuil is identified not alone by the picture’s title, but by the play of moored sailboats and boaters against the factories and other buildings on the opposite shore. Our position is in the boat basin, roughly as we are in Monet’s Sailboats on the Seine (Pl. 237)—some of the boats are the same—but looking more to the right. Manet here places leisure against a backdrop of industry, the essential confrontation that is the truth of Argenteuil, one we have already seen Monet paint the previous year, when he matched sailboats and the railroad bridge (Pl. 220). Manet shows that commercial sailing has been transformed into pleasure-boating: older river craft have become yachts, specifically designed for leisure, and real river boatmen have been displaced by gentlemen amateurs. There is almost nothing here of “nature” as it would have been understood a generation earlier, only water, sky, and a few trees. Manet’s figures are passively seated near the boats, typical Parisians engaged in social by-play, not in the sport itself. (If pictures could sing, we might hear the popular refrains of café songs about canotiers, which of course were another leisure-time transformation, since they were derived from seamen’s shanteys.)

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Description: Argenteuil by Manet, Edouard

239. Manet, Argenteuil, 1874. 148 × 115 cm. Tournai, Musée des Beaux-Arts.

In effect, Manet, perhaps owing to his association that summer with Monet and Renoir, has brought up to date his own Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Pl. 171). In 1863 he had been thinking primarily of the history of painting and of modernizing it by the irruptive presence of his contemporary figures. By 1874 he has become much more the naturalist, drawing upon a well-known, not an imaginary setting, and one that had distinctive resonance in the contemporary mind. Argenteuil was associated with yachtsmen who favored female companions of indifferent morals. Art critics of the period and Manet’s male friends alike assumed that the blank-faced woman was such a one, and surely the boatsman is assiduously soliciting his companion’s attention. She is, further, dressed in the showy clothing of lower middle-class women, rather than in the more elegant and restrained dress of the woman in Boating, or in Morisot’s later Summer’s Day (Pl. 151). Her straw hat, a popular one of the period, floats upward in a diverting way, and its swatch of white cloth hints at both sail and cloud (perhaps a bemused artist indulging in a bit of visual mockery). Still, Manet is more subtle than his critics believed, and we need a closer look.

The critics’ views, after all, may well reflect male assumptions that a woman shown as the object of a man’s attention was necessarily a cocotte. This woman has a conspicuous aplomb and, like the women in The Plum (Pl. 75) and A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (Pl. 80), she has none of the gestures or looks that were among the well-catalogued characteristics of a strumpet. Everything in the painting, in fact, differentiates its two figures. On the left, the woman’s uprightness is supplemented by the nearby verticals of masts and ropes, while on the right, the man’s active body finds echoes in the diagonals and curves of the adjacent yacht. Even his shirt has horizontal stripes to contrast with the woman’s verticals. Unlike the helmsman of Boating, whose body aims away from his companion, this man is using the encroaching manoeuvres of the gallant in the later Chez le Père Lathuille (Pl. 67). The debonair boater has one arm behind the woman, his leg overlaps her dress, and he not only holds her parasol, he positions it aggressively (in Boating the woman’s parasol rests unattended, opposite her). We get the impression that he is urging a reluctant or indifferent woman to take an excursion with him. It is midday, as we see from the sun’s steep angle, and the carelessly covered sail beyond his shoulder suggests a boat only temporarily moored, ready to depart at a moment’s notice. In many ways Argenteuil is the suburban equivalent of Chez le Père Lathuille. Both represent places on the fringes of the city where men would be expected to pursue women. Manet’s subtlety in each case lies in his refusal to let us know the results of the pursuit.

Argenteuil is the most provocative painting Manet did that summer of 1874, and that alone may have been the reason for submitting it to the Salon the following year. It is differentiated from Boating not just because of its more involved imagery; its colors are far brighter and full of contrasts, rather like Monet Painting in his Studio Boat: yellows, oranges, and touches of bright red against saturated blues.40 The two highly colored paintings were probably painted after Boating, The River at Argenteuil (London, The Dowager Lady Aberconway), and Sailboats at Argenteuil (Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie), for these three have a less contrasted palette closer to the work of 1872–73. Clark 1985, pp. 164–73, makes astute observations on the relation of brushwork and palette in Argenteuil to the images they construct. It was Manet’s sole entry in the Salon of 1875, and it made a suitable splash, once again ensuring his reputation as the enfant terrible of the artistic world. Its bright palette was shocking because to those unused to it, the individual colors jumped out of relationship and made the picture seem unintegrated, hence crude. Although Manet had not shown with the impressionists in their first group exhibition in 1874, he was now taken by many critics as the leader of the new plein-air school. Indeed, no such brilliantly hued picture had been seen before in the official Salon. Monet and Renoir had not exhibited there after 1870, and their recent work, limited to the exhibition of 1874 and to occasional dealers’ shows or sales, would have been unfamiliar to most. There was good reason to elevate Manet to the leadership position. In addition to his greater fame, he had learned a lot from the younger artists that summer. He adopted their saturated palette, and his painting of Monet in his studio boat is almost surely indebted to the picture Monet then had on his easel (Pls. 236, 237), for their renderings of the shore are similar, and their brushwork appears to have benefited from a mutual exchange.41 Manet must have borrowed Monet’s picture, or studied it assiduously. It is as though Manet projected the studio boat onto Monet’s composition, covering up the center but preserving left and right sides.

The reciprocity between Monet and Renoir was equally important, and had a longer history. Younger than Manet, from whom they had learned so much over the previous decade, they were often together. Their work at the Grenouillère in 1869 had been a veritable partnership, and again at Argenteuil, from 1873 to 1875, they frequently pursued the same motifs: ducks on the edge of the river, Monet’s garden, the meadows near the village and sailboats on the river. In 1874 they painted a justly famous pair of Sailboats at Argenteuil (Pls. 240, 241), whose palettes, with their contrasting orange-blue, red-green, and yellow-purple, were catalysts for Manet’s evolution that summer. Brilliant contrasts, involving both large, sun-flooded patches and small, broken brushwork, proved their efficacy in translating the effects of freshly viewed outdoor light. Broadly similar, the two paintings reward close study because they reveal the nuances that separate the two, differences that are consistent with those at the Grenouillère five years earlier. Renoir continued to take the lead in the use of a variety of intense and contrasting hues, Monet, in the articulation of clear surface pattern.

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Description: Sailboats at Argenteuil by Monet, Claude

240. Monet, Sailboats at Argenteuil, 1874. 60 × 81 cm. Private collection.

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Description: The Seine at Argenteuil by Monet, Claude

241. Renoir, Sailboats at Argenteuil, 1874. 50 × 61 cm. Collection, Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon. Bequest of Winslow B. Ayer.

Both pictures were taken from the shore of the boat basin, looking directly across the river. The Argenteuil end of the highway bridge just shows on the right edge of each (the plank dock in their foregrounds is the thin streak in the middle distance of Monet’s panorama from the bridge, Pl. 234). Renoir’s vantage point was slightly higher on the bank than Monet’s, leading to a greater expanse of water, and less sky. This allowed him to supply the river with more visual ballast than we find in Monet’s canvas: five sailboats instead of two, and a more elaborate play of reflections on the right (Pl. 243). In the right distance, for example, the reflection of the sailboat, intersected by an orange-red canoe or rowing shell, is surrounded by purples and olive greens. Further to the right, similar purples form the reflection of a span of the highway bridge and terminate an arabesque of purples and greens that play over the water. Compared to the same area of Monet’s picture, this portion of the river is a calm stretch, and our attention is dispersed rather equally among its parts. Monet concentrated instead on the two carmine racing shells, speeding downriver to the left (Pl. 242). They oppose the implied direction of the two sailboats, reducing activity on the river to the contrasting pairs.

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Description: Sailboats at Argenteuil, detail by Monet, Claude

242. Monet, detail of Sailboats at Argenteuil (Pl. 240).

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Description: Seine at Argenteuil, detail by Monet, Claude

243. Renoir, detail of Sailboats at Argenteuil (Pl. 241).

Other features of the two canvases ratify the disparities. Monet’s surface geometry aids a quick reading, whereas Renoir’s tapestry of varied effects makes us scan his picture more slowly. Monet’s dock is a straight plank that sharply cuts the right edge of the frame; Renoir’s sags slightly, and is eased into the composition from the corner full of marshy growth. The reflections of Monet’s sailboat have well-defined shapes, outlined in the oranges of boom, mast, and bowsprit (especially striking is the reflected mast, an orange stripe that splits a rectangle of contrasting blue before slicing the bottom of the frame); Renoir’s reflections have broken edges whose quavery dance is more important than easily grasped shapes. Even the ducks are differently viewed. Monet’s are in symmetrically disposed couples (echoes of the two pairs of boats); Renoir’s are scattered and help ruffle the reflections.

The contrasts extend to the implicit narratives the artists lay before us. Monet juxtaposes sailing and rowing, allied yet opposed ways of using the water, huge vertical triangles borne along by the wind versus the thin horizontal streaks of the shells, the minimum support for coordinated rowing effort. His river is narrower than Renoir’s, and its flow is emphasized by the oarsmen who are about to streak into the gap between the two sailboats. Renoir’s conception is more relaxed, his river almost as broad and directionless as a lake. One tiny shell makes us aware of rowing, but there is no hint of competitive urgency. Both pictures deal with leisure-boating at Argenteuil, but Monet conceived of competitive action in the forms of a clean-cut, bold organization, whereas Renoir thought of a tranquil boat basin rendered in the soft-edged patterns of a looser fabric.

Monet’s picture, which seems to typify boating at Argenteuil, has one feature that is nearly unique in his work there. It and one other are his only paintings that clearly show people on their sailboats.42 The other, Wildenstein 1974–85, vol. 1, no. 326 (private collection), was also painted in 1874. The boats are otherwise shown at a distance or, if close to us, they are invariably moored, as in Sailboats on the Seine (Pl. 237) and in The Bridge at Argenteuil (Pl. 244). Of fifty-one Argenteuil compositions that depict sailboats, including those in small scale at a distance, only three deal with the regattas that drew the crowds on weekends and holidays. Twenty-one others give prominence to boats under sail (including Pls. 232 and 234), but this adds up only to twenty-four. Twenty-seven, more than half, concentrate on moored boats. Of these, in turn, eleven have sails off in the distance (like Pls. 231 and 237), but sixteen are entirely limited to boats at anchor. Pictures of moored boats, with no humans present, were not interesting to Manet, Renoir, or Sisley, and we shall learn more about Monet if we inquire why they loom so large in his work.

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Description: The Bridge at Argenteuil by Monet, Claude

244. Monet, The Bridge at Argenteuil, 1874. 60 × 80 cm. Musée d’Orsay.

Unlike his comrades, Monet was a resident of Argenteuil even though we know that he preserved much of the visitor in his attitudes and was not very sociable with his neighbors. Like other artists who colonized the suburbs, he associated himself sufficiently with his adopted locality to feel indifference or disdain for the holiday visitors. Alexis Martin later gave witness to the dual life of a suburban artist. Asnières, he tells us,

is inhabited by artists, writers, administrative employees, and business people who have both the joy of living in the healthy air and the convenience of being only a few moments from Paris. Shut up in their own places on Sundays, they leave the village, its cafés, its restaurants … at the disposition of the crews from Paris.43 Martin 1894, p. 38. He follows this with a description of the mad rush in late evening to the train station, then the crowded ride back to the city, further horrors to be avoided by the suburban dweller.

Monet avoided the Sunday crowds, and his silently anchored boats give us the weekday aspect of the river. The boats enjoy, as it were, their own repose before the holiday onslaught. Embodiments not of local residents, but of well-to-do Parisians, they make us think of their absent owners, rather the way an empty chair summons up a human body. They have the appeal of anticipation, of waiting peacefully for their owners who, contemplating such paintings in the city, could dream of holiday sport in the open air. The exclusion of people in these paintings aids such dreams of leisure. We, the viewers, are the sincere lovers of boating and quiet rivers, and we do not have to rub elbows with the mass of weekend boaters (nor with local factory workers or laundresses). The paintings let us become the ideal visitor; we are the ones who are enjoying a genuine experience, and we do this in part by taking our distance from mere tourists, thankfully excluded from our sight.

Monet’s paintings of moored sailboats are considerably varied, but they share this dual character. The boats are the sign of Parisian leisure, but they are seen as a local person might view them, free of the clamor of the weekenders. In Sailboats on the Seine (Pl. 237), we have the vantage point of the locals who know the river. Monet took on this role, for he was an artist-worker-resident in his homely studio boat, and not a pleasure-seeker. He places us alongside him, in his boat, so close to the yachts that the nearest ones are cut off by the edges of the frame, so near to the water that the undulating reflections, like so many eels, work their way right under our feet. This is an initiate’s view, that of the perceptive observer who lets us join him in this conspiracy of intimate knowledge. No view of a regatta could do this, for then we would be passive witnesses to a public spectacle. In a way Monet is like Degas, who preferred the insider’s view of horse race and ballet, that is, the moments of anticipation and rehearsal rather than the actual events. Sailboats on the Seine has striking affinities with Degas’s Jockeys in front of the Grandstands (Pl. 163): a tipped-up, nearby surface over which our eye glides quickly; forms at rest, or nearly so, that are valued for their speed; potent wedges of space that infuse the scenes with energy. In both paintings there are smoking factories in the distance, the suburban industry that is in symbiosis with suburban leisure, each positing the other, and both assuming the urban visitor.

The Bridge at Argenteuil (Pl. 244) is a more contemplative picture. No industry here: Argenteuil is screened rather than revealed by the row of trees. The old ferryman’s house, converted to a popular café-restaurant, appears among the trees as though it were a private villa. Unlike Sisley’s Villeneuve (Pl. 227), there are no figures to activate the scene, and the road bridge does not plunge into the village (we cannot even see a break in the trees). It slides laterally into the composition, and the effect of the diminishing gaps of its spans is largely denied by the play of the vertical reflections of tollhouse and piers that march flatly and evenly across the surface. The three sailboats contribute to this horizontality not only by their orientation, but also by the way their masts and guys form a large triangle (would the foreground mast really have been taller than the one rising from the middle boat?).

In keeping with its more meditative mood, The Bridge at Argenteuil has a less agitated surface than Sailboats on the Seine. The latter was done with a Manet-like brio, and its long and fairly wide strokes were thinly painted, to emphasize the quickness of application, the effortlessness of well-honed skill. In the picture of the white-hulled boats, the water in the foreground is so smoothly painted that we cannot easily detect separate brushstrokes. The reflections above this blue zone are rendered in short horizontal and tilted dabs that speak more of studied care than of virtuoso speed (Pl. 245). Here the color harmonies are at their most complex. The picture as a whole depends principally upon the contrast of orange and blue, but among the reflections of shore and bridge are violets to contrast with the yellows, as well as blue-greens, olive greens, tans, oranges, pale blues, and yet other tints.

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Description: The Bridge at Argenteuil, detail by Monet, Claude

245. Monet, detail of The Bridge at Argenteuil (Pl. 244).

This composition is one of the best examples of early mature Impressionism, in which the brushwork varies according to the image being created: blended mixtures for clear water, choppy aggregates for reflections, wide, dragged horizontals for boat hulls, streaky verticals for masts, finely bunched diagonals and swirls for foliage, curves and irregular dabs for clouds. These different marks are also of varied thickness. The smoother ones for water and sky are so thin as to have negligible substance, but the boats, trees, clouds, and multicolored reflections have substantial impasto. In front of the original painting (in reproductions, tactile textures have little role), the viewer unconsciously lets the thicker strokes confer a factitious “reality” on their images, compared to the insubstantiality of water and sky. Before Impressionism, painters had varied the direction and texture of their brushwork according to the images they defined, but for Monet these manipulations of paint were even more vital, because he had renounced the traditional underpinnings of modeling in light and dark. It is an obvious remark, but one that can bear repeating: the representation of leisure was the result of hard work.

Sailing, as everyone knows who ventures on the water, involves real work. Monet nonetheless took no interest in the hauling, pulling, and other movements of the body that are an integral feature of the sport. Comparisons with the boating pictures of his younger contemporary Caillebotte make it clear that Monet interpreted sailing as an effortless indulgence of leisure. Caillebotte shows that physical effort was indeed a feature of boating, although he concentrated on rowing, which demands more steady effort than sailing. Alone among the impressionists, he was an avid sailor and rower and competed in races. Thanks to his wealth, he had several rowing skiffs and sailboats, some of them built to his own designs. His family had a home on the Yerres river south of Paris, and in 1877 and 1878 he did a whole group of rowing pictures there. He was also frequently at Argenteuil in the mid-1870s and settled permanently in Petit-Gennevilliers by 1882.

Caillebotte’s Oarsmen and Oarsman in a Top Hat (Pls. 246, 247) are studies in contrast from an insider’s viewpoint. In each case the viewer is the proverbial fly on the wall and has no psychological presence in the fiction of the picture. Oarsmen shows two experienced rowers with arms, legs, and oars outstretched to capture the exertion involved. In the powerful thrust of his forms towards us, paired with the opposed plunge of the boat inwards, Caillebotte suggests the alternating surge and rest of the rowers’ actions. His men wear the straw hats and clothing of the serious canotier that distinguish them from both the working riverman and the mere amateur. Their skiff is no longer the heavy, all purpose riverboat of the previous generation (Pl. 199), but a craft expressly designed for the middle-class boater. Its slender shape bespeaks its place in the realm of competitive sport, that particularly modern form of leisure. The broader boat of Oarsman in a Top Hat better suited the unskilled amateur, although it, too, had a lighter structure than the traditional rowboat. Caillebotte’s oarsman is a middle-class Parisian on an outing, as we can tell from his clothing and from his concerned look off to the left. He has a right to be concerned: his two oars are not being pulled evenly. Like most right-handed beginners, his strong arm has pulled the stroke further on that side. The imaginary back-and-forth of the other painting lacks here, despite the similar composition, since the rower’s body leans back and covers the prow of the boat. Body and boat form a single, large rhythm, with the shoulders taking the place of the prow; even the folds of the trousers repeat the curve of the forward seat. Caillebotte’s composition might owe a debt to Manet’s Boating (Pl. 238) of 1874, but if so, he chose to emphasize the awkward amateur in contrast to Manet’s seasoned veteran.

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Description: Oarsmen by Caillebotte, Gustave

246. Caillebotte, Oarsmen, 1877. 81 × 116 cm. Private collection.

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Description: Oarsman in a Top Hat by Caillebotte, Gustave

247. Caillebotte, Oarsman in a Top Hat, 1877–78. 90 × 117 cm. Private collection.

Both of Caillebotte’s pictures have the zooming perspective of his Paris scenes (Pl. 27), and therefore a feeling of urban dynamism, as though the city were just over our shoulder. In other paintings of rowing on the Yerres he transports us more wholly into a realm of peaceful leisure, away from the city. The Skiffs (Pl. 248) is typical of these. Over a reach of calm water we look at three men in slim skiffs, wielding kayak paddles without, it seems, much effort. A light-suffused landscape and the river’s gentle diagonal replace the darker tones and plunging perspectives of the other two compositions. The skiffs glide smoothly along, not in competitive alignment, but in a casual order that is subtly controlled by the tree trunks and their reflections. Taken together, Caillebotte’s several paintings of rowers display the gamut of this sport and treat it with an insider’s concentration. Unlike Monet, he brings us close to the activity of boating, while he also excludes the social encounters that were Manet’s chief concern. For pictures of rowers, Caillebotte’s only rival was Renoir, but, like Manet, Renoir was interested less in the sport itself than in the ways it brought men and women together in a lively suburban society.

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Description: Boating on the Yerres (Périssoires sur l'Yerres) by Caillebotte, Gustave

248. Caillebotte, The Skiffs, 1877. 103 × 156 cm. Milwaukee Art Center Collection. Gift of The Milwaukee Journal Company in Honour of Miss Faye McBeath.

Rowing and Dining at Chatou

In Renoir’s work, the counterpart to Monet’s sailboats at Argenteuil and Caillebotte’s oarsmen on the Yerres, was a group of paintings that featured rowing along the Seine, including men and women in the boats and along the shore. The Canoeists’ Luncheon (Pl. 250), painted at the end of the decade, is one of the most beautiful of these. In the five or six years since he and Monet had painted side by side at Argenteuil, his palette has shifted further in the direction of light-flooded colors, whose orchestration drowns out the play of light and dark, that is, of sculptural modeling which was heretofore the basis of painting. (Monet and Morisot, also, had altered their palettes in the same direction.) Here the overall harmony relies on the contrast of orange and blue, together with a secondary opposition of red and green. These pairs are interwoven, so that the orange of the boats reappears, in duller tones, in the chairbacks and still life on the table, and the greens, in the same still life as well as in the jacket and shirt of the man on the left. The brushwork has the silken quality peculiar to Renoir, a way of using texture to achieve compositional unity and to express in the very structure of paint the delight in harmonies of nature and society that so sharply distinguishes this artist from Manet and Degas. None of the brilliant cynicism and underlying tensions that mark Manet’s boaters (Pl. 239); none of Monet’s indifference to the human figure, either, and none of Caillebotte’s sometimes clumsy directness. This small picture is resplendent in its balance of fragility and intensity; it hovers on the edge of ecstasy.

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Description: The Railroad Bridge at Chatou by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

249. Renoir, The Railroad Bridge at Chatou, 1881. 54 × 65.7 cm. Musée d’Orsay.

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Description: Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise (The Rowers’ Lunch) by Renoir,...

250. Renoir, The Canoeists’ Luncheon, 1879–80. 54 × 65 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Potter Palmer Collection, 1922.437.

The Canoeists’ Luncheon is the quintessence of suburban leisure. If we compare it to its urban counterpart, Renoir’s contemporaneous End of the Lunch (Pl. 73), we understand that the airy colors and cornsilk texture are deliberate ways of embracing outdoor sensuality and relaxation, as distinct from the darker, more controlled tones of the urban interior. Paint and subject are, once again, intimately related. To the feathery colors and textures correspond the relaxed poses and the dispersed incidents of the riverside picture. On the left a man is seated, relaxed after his meal, with his napkin still in his lap. He looks at the woman nearest us while to the right is another contented diner, cigarette in hand, whose mouth hints that he is talking, although he might be silently ruminating. The two men are split apart, but joined by the woman’s form, by the overhead arch, and by the linking movements of the boats. The boats are prominent because of their orange color, in that Matisse-like aperture towards which everything draws us, including the angle of the smoker’s body and that of the table. The further boat, a four-man racer with coxswain, is darting down the river—an axis we might might not otherwise be conscious of—but the near boat is more sociable, since it is headed in towards us. It has a woman at the oars, and her boat points directly at the woman in the foreground, who looks in that direction; they both wear the blue flannel dresses of female boaters.44 Maupassant identifies the canotières’ dress in Yvette and other stories. Although separated from the foreground, the woman in the boat makes up a kind of foursome and links the diners with the boating that they came here to enjoy.

Renoir’s picture was probably, though not certainly, painted at Chatou, three miles downstream from Argenteuil. If sailing was the emblem of Argenteuil in the 1870s, it was rowing that distinguished Chatou. Not needing the winds that favored Argenteuil, rowing could be enjoyed up and down the Seine and its tributaries. Its early center, as we saw, was at Asnières, but as that suburb grew more industrialized and populated, Chatou was increasingly preferred by rowers. It was Renoir who paid tribute to them and their activities. He began frequenting Chatou in the middle of the 1870s and for several years was a regular at the Restaurant Fournaise, a popular spot on the island there. Nine of his figure paintings and seven river-scapes have been identified with Chatou, and several others, including The Canoeists’ Luncheon, whose sites cannot be specified with assurance, apparently also show its banks.

The attractions of Chatou were well appreciated by the middle of the century. It was only nine miles from the Gare Saint-Lazare, and by 1841 was served by stations on both sides of the river, at Chatou and Reuil. Joanne’s guide of 1856 lists a population of 1,200 for the village, clustered on the west bank around the highway bridge, but he noted that since the railroad had made it so accessible, the once large eighteenth-century estates nearby were being cut up for pleasure villas. The rising bourgeoisie could prove it was taking over the country, for it now built homes on lands once owned by Louis XV’s minister Bertin and the chancellor de Maupeou. L’Illustration, in the series of articles that touted Bougival and the Grenouillère, wrote that Chatou, formerly “a mediocre village,” could now boast that “A whole colony of Parisians, friends of country life, has spread along both banks of the river. Elegant villas have taken the place of little rustic houses.”45 G.B., “Les Environs de Paris, Chatou—Le Vésinet,” L’Illustration 53 (22 May 1869): 333. For population figures, see Joanne 1856, pp. 44–45, and Barron 1886, p. 497. Its population rose to 3,000 by 1886, but through the impressionist era the nearby riverbanks were more open and verdant than at Argenteuil or Bougival.

The Seine at Chatou was divided into two channels, separated by the continuous band of narrow islands that ran for miles, beginning at Bezons, just south of Argenteuil, and continuing past Chatou around to Bougival and Port Marly. From the road bridge, which crossed over the southern tip of Chatou Island, there were stone steps down to a jetty that led to the wider Chiart Island (also called Chatou Island). The Restaurant Fournaise was there, facing Reuil, and just south of it was the railroad bridge that rested on the island on its passage across the Seine. It shows in the distance of several of Renoir’s paintings and, more prominently, in The Railroad. Bridge at Chatou (Pl. 249). Here we are positioned in a fenced-in clearing (a private garden or the courtyard of a café) on Chiart Island, looking south; in the gateway is a man in a straw boater. It is the ideal setting for leisure: domesticated flowers and trees surrounding a clearing alongside the river, and above, the means of getting there, a bridge so generously enveloped in foliage that it makes a graceful capriole, not a dynamic industrial leap. Further downstream, beyond the railroad bridge, a narrow spit of land linked Chiart to Croissy Island. The Grenouillère was therefore only a ten- or fifteen-minute walk from the Chatou bridge.

Commercial traffic used the deeper west channel of the Seine at Chatou and Croissy, leaving the other, on the Reuil side, mostly for pleasure-boating. The Reuil shore was less built upon, and the islands were largely in fields and woods, sprinkled with a number of small boaters’ cafés and more ambitious, if still casual, guinguettes, generally, like the Grenouillère, offering some cabins and rooms together with food, drink, rental boats, and dancing. Many artists and writers lived in Chatou and Reuil, and others, like Flaubert, François Coppée, and Renoir, were regular visitors. Guy de Maupassant was an avid rower and sailor who favored the river near Chatou, which he described in a number of short stories. Perhaps it was Maupassant whom Louis Barron had in mind when he described the bend of the river near Chatou as “an artificial paradise, whose changing elect are millionaires ruining themselves or artists getting rich.”46 Barron 1886, pp. 493–94.

Renoir’s most famous painting of Chatou, Luncheon of the Boating Party (Pl. 251), begun in late summer, 1880, shows the terrace of the Restaurant Fournaise whose spirited clientele was described by Maupassant (as the “restaurant Grillon”) in La Femme de Paul (Paul’s Mistress) of 1881. The painting is devoted to this society, but its view of the river, framed by tree-top foliage and the translucent awning, is more than a mere backdrop. It instantly identifies a riverside restaurant whose customers were boaters and their friends. Thanks to patches of white and flashes of orange-red, we see two sailboats, one rowboat and, on the left edge, a moored barge with a red-roofed building on the bank above (Pl. 252). Barely discernible is the railroad bridge, up behind the scalloped edge of the awning (which flutters to the same breezes that favor the sailboats). Dominating the river view is Alphonse Fournaise, son of the proprietor. His muscular arms served him well, since he helped launch the boats that the establishment rented out from its quai below. He wears a straw hat, and so does Renoir’s friend Lhote, in the upper-right corner. Brim up or brim down, with or without a band, it was the current form of a boatman’s sun hat, derived from a cheap country model of woven straw; Manet gave it to his sailors at Argenteuil and to Monet (Pls. 236, 238, 239), and Caillebotte to his oarsmen (Pls. 246, 248). Three of the women wear variations of this basic straw hat, and in the right corner, a young customer sports a more citified and debonair boater, the kind worn by several men in Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (Pl. 135). (He was apparently modeled by Caillebotte, by then a close friend of Renoir’s.)

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Description: Luncheon of the Boating Party by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

251. Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881. 129.5 × 172.5 cm. Washington, Phillips Collection.

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Description: Luncheon of the Boating Party, detail by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

252. Renoir, detail of Luncheon of the Boating Party (Pl. 251).

The hat and costumes in Renoir’s picture tell us a great deal. Alphonse Fournaise is paired with the man opposite, who looks in his direction. The client’s bare arms and shirt are the certain sign of the sportsman who emulates the real riverman. Alphonse’s gaze takes us back to the top-hatted man (the model was Charles Ephrussi, rich collector and writer), in a contrast of male types that foretells Seurat’s Sunday on the Island of the Grande Jatte of 1886. Two men wear bowlers. One of them, in the upper right, is Lestringuez, Renoir’s comrade who, with Lhote, had appeared in the picture of the Moulin de la Galette. The other, in the center, his back to us, was posed by another acquaintance, the former cavalry officer baron Barbier, equally a friend of Maupassant. Furthest back is a man wearing what appears to be the mariner’s cap that was more favored a generation earlier. Completing the masculine assortment is the bareheaded young man in his chic striped smock; he is yet another member of Renoir’s circle, the journalist Maggiolo. Chief among the women is Aline Charigot, Renoir’s future wife, who purses her lips at the hirsute lap dog. Below the top-hatted Ephrussi, raising her glass, is Angèle, a teenaged model from Montmartre. The originals of the other women are disputed, but the woman in the upper right, adjusting her hat with gloved hands (she is about to leave), wears the costume appropriate to an actress or a woman about town.

The luncheon picture is a suburban equivalent of Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, and the artist’s most ambitious figure composition since 1876. It also shows Renoir’s preferred grouping of writers, artists, and models, set off by the local restaurateur-boatman and the top-hatted collector, a relaxed and harmonious society dominated by men (they outnumber women by nine to five) for whom women are models and matelottes (female sailors) to be admired. It is a world of convivial but unprovocative sensuality, built around a table full of good things that are painted with a lushness worthy of Velasquez, worthy also of the still life in Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère (Pl. 80). Except for its colors and brushwork (big exceptions nonetheless!), Renoir’s painting is more traditional than Manet’s, and its forms are more sculpturally rounded that those of his own Canoeists’ Luncheon, a smaller and less formal canvas. It is a large exhibition picture whose conservatism harks back to Renaissance and baroque banqueting scenes. The figures form a hollow for the splendid table: those on either side look towards the center, and two in the rear look frontwards. So stable is the result that we hardly notice the signs of impressionist structure that depart from tradition: the high horizon line, the rapid plunge into depth (the heads of the rear figures are “too small” for the distance, like many of Degas’s), the diagonal of open space that separates the two on the left from the others.

Renoir, not usually thought of as a cunning painter, wove his picture together by adroitly adjusting his edges and colors. The top of Alphonse Fournaise’s hat just touches the awning (so does the tip of the adjacent sail), and it shares orange and yellow with the cloth above; the blue that edges his hat reappears as the band on the hat of the woman at the railing; the red of the awning’s border has dropped down to mark her collar and cuff, and the same vermillion dances over the collar of the woman nearest us, on the right; Aline Charigot’s head and hat are neatly framed by Alphonse’s chest, and her upper arm continues the bend of his hand; one hand of the man in the right foreground lines up with that of the woman near him, and the prow of his boater fits snugly into the V of Maggiolo’s smock; the crowd to the right of Alphonse and Aline forms a triangle, with its apex at the girl leaning on the railing; within the crowd the heads are arranged in triplets and pairs, interlocked by arabesques and reverberations of colors and shapes.

Lest we exaggerate the conservatism of Renoir’s luncheon painting, we should take a look at his earliest effort of comparable theme and size; it will help us mark out the route he had traveled. The Inn of Mother Anthony, Marlotte (Pl. 253), done in 1866, was his first large figure piece. The inn was a rustic center for artists and bohemians who gathered near Marlotte, on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest. They coated the plaster walls with caricatures, which show in Renoir’s canvas; the one in the upper left reproduces his own contribution, a burlesque of Murger, author of the famous Vie de Bohème. In the subject, as well as in the dark tones and rounded forms, Renoir’s painting recalls Courbet, the controversial mid-century realist and self-proclaimed socialist who was a hero to the younger vanguard. The woman clearing the table is a Courbet type, Nana, the daughter of Mère Anthony, who glides away to the right. The standing man, preparing his tobacco, is Renoir’s older friend, the well-off painter Jules Le Coeur, with whom he frequently stayed at Marlotte, and whose family commissioned pictures of Renoir. Below him is an unidentified man, but the seated figure with a broad-brimmed hat is known to be Sisley, who was working with Renoir at Marlotte. On the table is L’Evénement, the Paris newspaper which that spring published Zola’s reviews that took up the cudgels for Manet and favorably mentioned Monet. These are three young men who continue to discuss Parisian events while outside the city to partake of a “natural” environment. Artists of democratic leanings, they feel close to innkeepers and villagers, who were a welcome contrast to city sophisticates. They look forward to the artists and writers in the Chatou luncheon composition, as Nana does, to Alphonse Fournaise.

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Description: Mother Anthony's Tavern by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

253. Renoir, The Inn of Mother Anthony, Marlotte, 1866. 195 × 130 cm. Stockholm, Nationalmuseum.

In the leap from Renoir’s Marlotte inn to the Chatou restaurant, a whole generation seems to have intervened. The changes are equally in the subjects and the ways they are painted. The ordinary china cups and plates, the pears and the bread at Mère Anthony’s, have turned into stemware, compotier, liqueur, and grapes at Fournaise’s. Wood beams and plaster are exchanged for striped awning and railing; a dark village interior, for the luminous edge of a river; sober, plainspoken cloth and brushwork, for canoeists’ costumes and brilliant colors. In the fifteen years between the two pictures, Barbizon art has been converted to Impressionism, social realism to suburban realism. Both restaurants were artists’ haunts, but Mère Anthony, content to have them “discover” her inn, has been replaced by Monsieur Fournaise, an entrepreneur like Seurin at the Grenouillère or Sari at the Folies-Bergère, who uses the fame of visiting artists to assist a thriving business in leisure.

Contemporary writers often tell us of the ways in which old inns and country drinking places were transformed by the ever increasing number of Parisians coming out to the suburbs. The flâneur Alfred Delvau, for example, writing in 1862, lamented the spoiling of a favored village restaurant, Au Père Cense, near Fontenay, south of Paris; it would be the rough equivalent of Mère Anthony’s in nearby Marlotte. He loved it partly because of the artists who went there, including Courbet, Murger, and Baudelaire. He regrets that he and his friends who had “discovered” Père Cense had to witness its alteration (note the disdain for the ordinary middle class):

For a dozen years, this bouquet of villages is peopled every Sunday with promenaders who formerly would not have known the way there….thanks to their reiterated encouragements, this adorable spot has been made into a sort of fair, ornamented with restaurants and pistol shoots. It absolutely lacks gaiety and poetry. These amiable Sunday Parisians could not touch a painting by the good Lord without spoiling it; they have found the means of replacing the woodsmen and hamadryads of former times with picnic debris and empty wine bottles.

He then describes Au Père Cense, at the beginning, a plain thatched cottage where one shook Père Cense’s hand, patted his dog, and then had a glass of wine at a simple wooden table under the trees. Alas!,

Where is it now, Père Cense’s old wine barrel? Plaster and stone have replaced the thatched roof and the walls of yellow earth, so picturesque in their nudity, so clean and joyous in their simplicity. There are still wine barrels and the arbor of poplars, but they are hidden, as though shameful, by constructions serving as dining rooms for ladies and gentlemen who hope to rediscover Paris in the countryside. One wears silk dresses these days in Père Cense’s cabaret…and on silverplate, attended by waiters in proper jacket and white apron, one dines on all manner of charming things, but detestable, and very expensive.47 Delvau 1862, pp. 283–84, 286.

In Renoir’s own life, he made the change from Mère Anthony’s to the boater’s restaurant at Chatou—without regret. The history of Impressionism is in part the acceptance of, even the indulgence in these changes. Courbet, Millet, Corot, perhaps even Delvau, could still feel close contact with villagers, but by 1880 most of the impressionists were too urbanized for that, too devoted to exploring contemporary life; Mère Anthony and Père Cense were an anachronism by then for the vanguard, even though hordes of tourists, not yet up with Impressionism, were descending on Ganne’s inn at Barbizon and other quaint places where they could sit in seats once warmed by artists and look at their caricatures on the walls. It is true that Pissarro and Cézanne maintained the outward appearance of Barbizon artists, and something of their identification with villagers, but neither of them was a Parisian. Renoir preferred the company of artists, writers, and rowers at Chatou.

One more painting will complete Renoir’s gamut of boaters’ leisure at Chatou. In Oarsmen at Chatou (Pl. 254), the riverside restaurants are somewhere behind us as we look from Chatou Island over towards Reuil. On the opposite bank is La Mère Lefranc, a well-known inn that catered to boaters; its shaded courtyard extends to the right.48 Identified in Catinat 1952, p. 39. Eventually, through a punning transformation, it became La Merle Franc. In front of it, a barge is making its way slowly upstream, but, in contrast to Monet’s powerful barges at Asnières (Pl. 200), it gives only a hint of commerce. It is framed on the left by a sailboat, and on the right by two single sculls, loosely sketched in. The centerpiece of the picture is the two-person gig that angles across the foreground. These gigs were built for one rower and a passenger, who faced forward and adjusted the rudder with two hand-held lines. Such boats were favored by amateurs for their ease in steering and their companionability (in another painting Renoir showed two women in an identical boat),49 The Seine at Asnières, 1879 (National Gallery, London). Despite the traditional title, Renoir’s site does not accord with Asnières, but it has not yet been identified. but they were also used by skilled oarsmen in competitions. Here the rower, holding his boat against the current, is apparently issuing an invitation to one of the people on the shore. He is dressed in an urban rower’s garb, flat-topped straw hat, white shirt, and flaring tie. He faces a man identified as the painter Caillebotte, equally in the dress of a gentleman boater. The four figures (the woman is Aline Charigot) are loosely, if symmetrically arranged, implying their companionship and shared interests, with none of the provocative contrasts that Manet gave the two boaters of his Argenteuil (Pl. 239), and none of the aloofness that Monet manifested in front of his silently moored boats. The trousers and skirt of the two figures nearest us almost merge with the marshy vegetation, but their upper garments, where they reach the level of the boat, change color to suit the bright hues and light tones of boat and water. Lushness is the word for Renoir’s color, as well as the setting: saturated oranges and orange-reds against blues and greens. Full sunlight explains the prominence of the oranges, whereas in The Canoeists’ Luncheon (Pl. 250), the shaded terrace is bathed in indirect light, hence its preponderance of blues. The different palettes of these two pictures, in other words, is consistent with Renoir’s manner of making color suit varying conditions of light.

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Description: Oarsmen at Chatou by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

254. Renoir, Oarsmen at Chatou, 1879. 81 × 100 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Gift of Sam A. Lewisohn.

Renoir’s bright colors have mellowed with time, and because we are familiar with Matisse and other modern colorists, we readily accept brilliant oranges, blues, yellows, and greens as part of a vision of beautiful “nature.” Orange boats, however, could hardly be regarded as blending with nature and, like the boaters’ costumes, they stood out against traditional river colors and shapes. Ostentatious assertions of leisure and class, they were the clamorous tones of city dwellers laying claim to the river. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had been aristocrats and wealthy bourgeois who had launched boats on these same waters, but it was rivermen and servants who rowed them about. Now it was the far more numerous middle class that vacationed on the dismembered estates, many of them self-made men (or aspiring to be such) who propelled themselves in slender craft, created specifically for sport. Like Caillebotte, Alphonse Karr, Maupassant, and the Goncourts, Renoir conceived of boating as a perfect expression of modern life, of middleclass—and artistic!—liberty, hedonistic enjoyment, essential escape from city work. In the Goncourts’ Manette Salomon, the phrases that accompany Anatole’s boat down the Seine harmonize well with Renoir:

… foliage pocked with shadows, copses edged in strips of grass worn by Sunday walks; barks with their vivid colors drowned in the trembling water, moires stirred by moored yawls, sparkling shores…. On the hillsides the splendid daylight gently deposited the sweetness of velvety blue into the hollows of the shadows and the greens of the trees…. On little islands, red-roofed houses with green shutters stretched out their yards full of gleaming laundry.50 Manette Salomon (Paris, 1867), pp. 98–99.

The strong colors and liberated hedonism of the Goncourts and Renoir were insistently modern, and yet we easily see, especially in the painter, that there were substantial links with the past. Renoir’s Oarsmen at Chatou is not merely a representation of friends along the Seine, it is an allegory of summertime, a modern version of a humanist theme, prominent since the Renaissance, that managed to thrive in a Christian culture. The picture has the air of a fable, of an ideal world of leisure without work, of sensual pleasure without tarnish (none of the floating detritus and scattered picnic debris that contemporaries complained about). Its modernity should not blind us to its participation in this age-old European tradition. For example, Renoir’s older contemporary, Puvis de Chavannes, painted more than one allegory of summer. In The Pleasant Land (Pl. 255), as in Oarsmen at Chatou, life is easy.51 Puvis’s canvas is a small version of the picture exhibited in 1882, done for the Parisian town house of the painter Léon Bonnat (now in the Musée Bonnat, Bayonne). Women and children rest and play, fruit is easily gathered, and men draw fish from the sea with little effort. No industry here, for Puvis created his comforting arcadia, with its vaguely classical garments and poses, as compensation for the constant upheavals in modern society. He drew from the Mediterranean past, that deep well of history, myth, and art which still nourished so many of the French, even as they voyaged rapidly into a new era.

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Description: The Pleasant Land by de Chavannes, Puvis

255. Puvis de Chavannes, The Pleasant Land, 1882. 25.8 × 47.3 cm. New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery. The Mary Gertrude Abbey Fund.

Puvis, recipient of numerous commissions for public buildings, offered contemporaries a reassuring version of familiar ideals of leisure, invigorated by a deliberate primitivizing style (the reclining woman, hand on hip, anticipates Gauguin and Picasso). His colors are subdued and his forms flattened, recalling the tones of sculpture and of old wall decorations. Their organization follows a compositional archetype well established in earlier centuries: the land occupies the lower-left foreground, and some of the figures, by looking to the right, aid the sweep of our eye in that direction. They, and we, look out over a body of water that is a passage to another shore off in the distance (the water is a triangle that repeats, upside-down, the shape of the land). Renoir used the very same structure—proof of his ties to tradition—and his picture also removes us from the city by engaging us in longings for an unspoiled realm. The contrast with Puvis nevertheless tells us much about both artists. Renoir’s peaceful land, idealized though it is, was on the edge of Paris. It was a tangible, reachable place, a goal that one could strive for, a blending together of the real and the ideal, of past and present.

Renoir succeeded more than Puvis in modernizing tradition, in making it a viable element of vanguard practice and, eventually, part of the dominant pictorial conception of the modern era. The tug of tradition was always strong in Renoir, and just four or five years after Oarsmen at Chatou, he turned openly towards past art (his “Ingres” or “Sour” period). That might seem a reactionary turn against Impressionism, but we can see it also as a way for the energies of Impressionism to penetrate the somnolent body of grand art, giving it enough life to appeal to the younger generation. The upstart Seurat, in his Bathing Place, Asnières of 1884, made a radical style by mixing Impressionism with the classicizing tradition (he was called a “modernizing Puvis”). Furthermore, Renoir’s Ingres period underpinned Maillol’s monumental nudes at the turn of the century and also had something to say to Matisse and Picasso. As for his impressionist work at Chatou, the Fauve paintings of Derain and Vlaminck, done twenty-five years later along the very same shores, are unthinkable without Renoir, whose vivid oranges and blues proved their efficacy in translating the imagery of leisure.

Artists’ Gardens

Renoir created images of the perfect suburb, where benign nature was arranged to suit the young Parisians who had come out from the city. No old, infirm women or men in his pictures, but beautiful young ones; no hard labor, but play; no picnic debris, but flowery banks. Chatou and the other riveraine suburbs became pleasure gardens in his compositions, so much so that it is often impossible to specify the sites. Young couples sit or stroll in a flowered glade or along a lush embankment that might be anywhere in this pleasant world, since it was invented by Parisians as a stage for their leisure. Even when a particular place is identified, as in The Railroad Bridge at Chatou (Pl. 249) we seem to be in a garden or at the edge of a park. Monet made the same juxtaposition in his Train in the Countryside (Pl. 218), where we see the train across a park whose strollers look over at us. The trains are a reminder that “nature” in the suburbs was increasingly in the hands of the various enterprises that profited from leisure: the railroads, the boat-rental agencies, bathing establishments, village fairs, riverside guinguettes (Seurin’s Grenouillère, Fournaise’s restaurant). Parisians and visitors to the capital expected nothing less.

The great gardens of Paris, meanwhile, overtop even the cafés chantants as “side-shows.” Asnières, a few miles from Paris, on the Versailles and Saint-Cloud railways, is the most popular of the suburban gardens; and there is no special description of it necessary, for when trees, flowers, lights, music, crowds and unrestrained dancing are mentioned, and the additional suggestion is made that they are all in perfection, the whole fact suggests itself to those who have any “experience.” This of the night: by day Asnières has its boat-races on the Seine….52 Morford 1867, p. 240.

The suburbs and the near countryside were also gardens in the quieter sense of the term, well-disposed places where one could seek out a personal if not a private experience. Renoir, Monet, and Morisot did many pictures that show figures strolling through meadows near suburban villages, or along the Seine. These are invariably women, or women accompanied by children, as in Morisot’s Hide and Seek (Pl. 256). They do not play the peasant, but wear the dress of middle-class visitors from the city. Men are seldom present in such compositions because of the venerable association of women and children with nature. Men were placed in other settings suggestive of productivity or energetic display (in the suburbs, this meant rowing, sailing, or courting women). Women were more appropriately positioned among flowers and fields, those signs of nature’s bounty, a bounty that seemed to spread itself out, like the flowers, without hard work. Morisot’s woman and child play around a flowering bush that rises from the broad fields for their pleasure, a symbol both of their leisure and of the fruitfulness of the land. This is a very companionable “nature,” one that suits the middle-class city dweller very well since it does not remind her of sweat, of poverty, of those other women who bend their backs in the fields or in the barns. Morisot, like Monet and Renoir, represented her generation’s aspirations by turning her back on dark forests, rocky glades, rugged hillsides, and laboring peasants, the images now hopelessly romantic that had dominated the work of Courbet, Millet, and Théodore Rousseau. She favored instead the subjects and the techniques of Corot and Daubigny, major predecessors because they had preferred the country stroll to mountain fastnesses and farm workers. Landscape indeed rose to great prominence on the Paris art market, but in Morisot’s generation it dealt mostly with the garden suburb, less often with the more remote places free of the city’s presence.

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Description: Hide and Seek by Morisot, Berthe

256. Morisot, Hide and Seek, 1873. 45.1 × 54.9 cm. New York. From the collection of Mrs. John H. Whitney.

Morisot’s models were apparently her sister Edma and her daughter, whom she frequently visited at their estate in Maurecourt, near Auvers on the Oise river, northwest of Paris. She often showed them in their park-like garden, usually with another child. In The Butterfly Chase (Pl. 257) a young woman poses for us, holding her net at an angle that links a young sapling with an ancient flowering bush. On the other side of the sapling one child also poses for us, while another has squatted down to reach for a flower or a butterfly. Beyond her, barely decipherable through the foliage, a woman sits reading, facing away from us. Despite the neat framing of the central woman, the picture has a casual order and a light touch that suit this kind of garden, a jardin anglais or natural garden, more popular now than the formal French garden, which carried the connotations of imperial order, no longer desirable.

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Description: The Butterfly Chase by Morisot, Berthe

257. Morisot, The Butterfly Chase, 1874. 47 × 56 cm. Musée d’Orsay.

Later, after her marriage to Manet’s brother Eugène, Morisot continued to favor suburban gardens. Vacationing at Bougival in the early 1880s, she painted her daughter Julie in the garden of their rented villa, sometimes alone, sometimes with a maid, and often with Eugène. Eugène Manet and Daughter at Bougival (Pl. 258) shows Julie playing with a large toy set (perhaps a train station?) supported on her father’s lap. Typically impressionist, Morisot presents them in a dispassionate manner; their closeness is evident from their shared activity, but not from any overt display. Both are in the proper country costume of well-to-do Parisians, rendered in the unique sketchy manner that Morisot had developed over the several previous years. The feeling of pervasive color-light is captured in dashes of light-toned strokes that hover and dance around the figures’ edges, without defining their three-dimensional substance (Pl. 259). It is a technique that roughly parallels the changes in Monet’s and Renoir’s work over the decade of the 1870s, but her strokes dart about the surface more than theirs do, like so many large electric sparks that have a vital energy of their own. She worked on a ruddy-colored ground that shows prominently along the left edge and bottom. Unlike the off-white grounds that Monet favored, it acts as an intermediate tone, a foil for the light colors that run over it; it is a basic constituent of Eugène’s brown jacket.

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Description: Eugène Manet and Daughter at Bougival by Morisot, Berthe

258. Morisot, Eugène Manet and Daughter at Bougival, 1881. 73 × 92 cm. Private collection.

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Description: Eugène Manet and Daughter at Bougival, detail by Morisot, Berthe

259. Morisot, detail of Eugène Manet and Daughter at Bougival (Pl. 258).

While Morisot was spending that summer of 1881 at Bougival, Manet had rented a house at Versailles, and there painted The Bench (Pl. 260), one of the most memorable of impressionist gardens. He had gone there to seek rest from the debilitating disease he had suffered from since 1879, the locomotor ataxia that killed him two years later. When viewing this picture, or those done in the garden of his rented villa at Reuil the following summer, we inevitably think of his early death and are unable to set aside the poignancy that results. We should not feel guilty, however. Art is not a “pure” experience, and we always bring to a picture a whole set of associations. Manet had moved to Versailles for the repose offered by the suburbs, and we share with the artist and his doctor, who urged him to seek a restful place, the idea of consoling nature (consolation and condolence are closely linked).

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Description: The Bench by Manet, Edouard

260. Manet, The Bench, 1881. 65.1 × 81.2 cm. Private collection.

Manet had gone to Versailles with the intention of painting Le Nôtre’s formal gardens. Their fame and elegance would have been suitable challenges to his ambitions. However, hampered by his illness, he had to give up the idea: “I’ve had to content myself with painting only my garden, which is the unloveliest of gardens.”53 Letter to Eva Gonzalès, 23 September 1981, cited in Manet 1983, p. 476. By Le Nôtre’s standards, his rented garden was indeed modest. The grassy areas are untrimmed, geraniums rise from a rough mulch, and only a sparse growth makes its way up the trellis to the rear. A sense of delicate abandon hovers over the garden, abetted by a woman’s yellow hat tossed over a bush behind the bench and by the untenanted bench itself. In front of it stands a brass and marble table that holds a carafe of water (or perhaps a vase). The brilliant reds of this garden, vibrating against the greens, are a recompense for what Manet deemed unloveliness, as is the secondary pairing of attenuated yellows and purples. There is also a nicely calculated, very French order to the arrangement. The bench emphasizes the diagonal of the path that takes our eye back to the horizontal run of the multi-arched trellis. Morisot, in the painting of her husband and child, had much the same organization (if we discount the two figures), but the exuberant drift of her brushstrokes and her more complicated palette give a quite different result.

The forms of Manet’s painting look quite crisp compared with Morisot’s, but regain their informal character when placed alongside yet another impressionist garden, Caillebotte’s Orange Trees (Pl. 261). This picture has something of Le Nôtre’s formality both in its organization and in its imagery. The intimate character of Manet’s and Morisot’s paintings is missing, for instead of small rental gardens, we face the grounds of a large estate. Paradoxically, the property of Caillebotte’s family at Yerres seems more “public” than the other artists’ rented spaces, for it has been arranged like the grounds of a great château, whose patterns are traceable to functions and privileges of state. The same patterns were used in the gardens that successive governments provided to the public, so Caillebotte’s metal chairs, boxed trees, and neatly trimmed paths would suit a corner of a Parisian park. This mixture of private and public finds expression in the contrast of the setting with the isolation of the artist’s brother Martial and their cousin Zoé, each lost in private moments of reading, like visitors to a public garden who have retreated into personal spaces. (Except for his slippers, tokens of the domestic setting, Martial is dressed just as the artist himself is, in Renoir’s Oarsmen at Chatou, Pl. 254)

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Description: The Orange Trees by Caillebotte, Gustave

261. Caillebotte, The Orange Trees, 1878. 155 × 117 cm. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The John A. and Audrey Jones Beck Collection.

The odd perspective and the color contrasts of Caillebotte’s painting contribute to its strange aspect. The bottom half is dominated by purples that form a very separate realm from the intense greens and orange-reds above. Nothing here of Morisot’s interwoven hues nor of Manet’s unifying balance of warm and cool tones. The foreground is curiously foreshortened (a slatted bench, which might have explained the sharp recession, is mostly hidden by Martial’s folded figure), and the distance is flattened like a theater backdrop. Although we know the land rises upwards, there is little to explain its tilt. Zoé’s silhouette, psychologically remote from Martial—and from us!—separates the two halves instead of uniting them, although her upper body is embraced by the curved lawn. We are therefore apt to conclude that the composition lacks Manet’s finesse, indeed, that it is quite clumsy, but we should also think of painters of a decade later, of Gauguin, Emile Bernard, Paul Signac, and Seurat. The wooden finials of the planters, and the slumbering dog, have a prescient quality if we look at them from Seurat’s vantage point. Caillebotte, halfway between the ages of Monet and Seurat, and the same age as Gauguin, was already leaving behind the qualities of the intimate and the personal, the private views that characterize the older impressionists, in search of the anonymous and the statuesque that Seurat exploited in his renderings of suburban parks and riverbanks.

Of all the impressionists it was Monet who was chiefly responsible for elevating the suburban garden to the ranks of the most admired and influential paintings of the early modern era. His pictures of the water gardens at Giverny are prized possessions and have led to the restoration of his house and grounds, now a popular tourist attraction although ungraced by any paintings. This phenomenon, by which an artist’s life, his paintings, and a notable garden became interdependent, evolved only after the late 1890s, when the estate at Giverny came into its own following years of work (Monet had moved there in 1883). However, gardens had already loomed large in Monet’s life and work much earlier. From 1872 to 1876, in his successive rented gardens at Argenteuil, he gave evidence of the ambitions only fully realized later at Giverny. He became an avid suburban gardener, lavishing much time on the gardens of the two houses he rented in succession, and painting at least thirty canvases of them. We have already seen one of them, Camille Monet on a Garden Bench (Pl. 182), introduced earlier in the context of flowers and fashion. Renoir and Manet also painted Monet’s garden in Argenteuil, so it served as the center of intersecting friendships and rapidly evolving plein-air style.

The first rented garden appears in Monet’s House at Argenteuil of 1873 (Pl. 262). His son Jean, elegantly dressed and holding a hoop, stands facing away from us on the firmly rolled sand. A woman, presumably his mother,54 Her features are indistinct, and some have worried over her identity, even conjecturing that she might be a maid. No maid would be shown dressed that way, however, and the proud father and husband must surely have wished to represent his family, as he did in so many other paintings. Recent historians (Isaacson 1978, pp. 205–206, and Tucker 1982, pp. 135–42) have said that several of Monet’s garden paintings at Argenteuil, including The Luncheon (Pl. 265), indicate the artist’s growing estrangement from his wife, but this might be a case of reading biography back into the pictures. Over the course of this decade, Monet was gradually leaving virtually all figure painting behind; besides, his failure to paint his future second wife Alice Hoschedé could hardly be put down to estrangement from her. peers out from the ivy-clad house, fronted by rich plantings and a phalanx of oriental vases that the artist apparently brought with him from Holland. The foreground is in shadow, like that in Caillebotte’s later Orange Trees, but the contrasts between areas of sun and shade are not very strong, and we have a more naturalistic result—within the canons of the new impressionist color and brushwork. The Luncheon (Pl. 265) shows a different view of the same garden, this time on a much larger canvas that Monet exhibited with the impressionists in 1876 as a “Decorative Panel.” This appellation arose from its huge size, for unlike a smaller painting, it would take over a whole wall; the designation “decorative” also excuses its casual subject which lacked the prominent figures one would have expected in an ambitious painting. Jean, again dressed like a proper middle-class child, sits playing in the shade by the abandoned luncheon table. Its two place settings are matched by the two women who stroll to the rear. The parasol and bag on the bench suggest that one of them is a visitor; the amusingly placed sun hat might be an auxiliary useful for country strolls.

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Description: The Artist's House at Argenteuil by Monet, Claude

262. Monet, Monet’s House at Argenteuil, 1873. 60.5 × 74 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. & Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Memorial Collection, 1933.1153.

These two pictures, along with Camille Monet on a Garden Bench and other garden scenes of 1872 to 1874 (fifteen altogether), create the impression of a prosperous middle-class home in the suburbs. Monet’s belated marriage had taken place in the summer of 1870, and that fall he had fled France for a year. When he moved to Argenteuil at the end of 1871, he at last established a conventional bourgeois household. Although he was constantly borrowing money, he was selling more paintings and his family lived well for a time, cheered on, one assumes, by the mood of post-war reconstruction. It is therefore fitting that his garden paintings show his pride in providing wife and child with a comfortable garden where, appropriately dressed, Camille could receive visitors from Paris, like any other suburban matron. The Monets were among the city dwellers who moved to the suburbs in increasing numbers, no longer vacationers, but year-round residents who could easily reach Paris on the convenient rail line. (The Monets’ rented house was across from the railroad station, which the artist painted several times.) The newcomers could pay more than the locals for lodgings and gradually took over more and more of the village. Townspeople and farmers (the two were not always distinct) sold their land to Parisians or built villas for rent and sale; as a result whole new quarters arose on the edges of Argenteuil. Monet’s district was one of those undergoing drastic change, a result of the railroad’s having been extended across the Seine at that point in 1863.

Monet’s next-door neighbor, Alexandre Flament, a landowning carpenter, built a new villa to take advantage of the burgeoning market, and Monet became his first tenant, moving there (at a 40% increase in rent) in the middle of 1874. The artist immediately set about gardening again, and before long had another flower-rich precinct for his always well-dressed child and wife. He devoted five paintings in 1875 and a further ten in 1876 to the garden. Gladioli (Pl. 263) is one of these and is typical of the later garden views in the way it crowds the canvas with blossoms, watched over by Camille Monet. Unlike the women whom Renoir surrounds with flowers in a number of contemporary paintings, she is not equated with the flowers as an example of sensual beauty. She is instead a stock figure, presented by the artist-husband less as an object of love than as mistress of his (rented) property, like the flowers, an essential proof of the good life; she is never shown at work. The flowers crowd forward on the surface, as they do in most of the later garden pictures at Argenteuil, giving a tapestry-like, enclosed space, rather than the open display of the earlier views. In Monet’s House at Argenteuil (Pl. 262), the space is like that of a stage with side wings, and each area has its own brushwork. In the later painting the brushwork also varies with the images, but it is everywhere fluttering and shaggy and contributes to the feeling of a sultry closeness.

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Description: Rounded Flower Bed (Corbeille de fleurs) by Monet, Claude

263. Monet, Gladioli, 1876. 60 × 81.5 cm. Detroit Institute of Arts.

Flower gardens are such a pleasant feature of middle-class life that we might think that they always characterized villages like Argenteuil. Not so. Monet’s flowers were those of the city dweller who has taken over village property to create for his family an ideal environment away from the city and its pressures, one that contrasts with the customary use of the land. A village garden of former days would look like those preferred by Pissarro (Pl. 264) with their vegetable plots, fruit trees, and often a few chickens or pigs. Elisée Reclus, the geographer, lamented the loss of these traditional gardens and their farmyard aspect. Like Pissarro, he preferred unspoiled villages to those in the suburbs: “For strollers walking down the muddy lanes of this make-believe countryside, nature is represented only by well-trimmed bushes and masses of flowers seen through the bars of fences.”55 Reclus 1866, p. 377. Pissarro and he shared a disdain for such gardens and instead felt close to Millet and earlier artists for whom peasants and villagers had formed a society devoted to work, not leisure. Van Gogh’s similar passions, in the next generation, show that Pissarro’s old-fashioned ideals were not necessarily backwards, but for Monet, as for Renoir, they were. We could state the contrast in the form of an equation: Monet’s flower gardens were to the old village plots as Fournaise’s restaurant was to Mère Anthony’s inn. In all domains, old country forms were giving way to new ones under the impact of leisure-seeking Parisians. For that matter, Monet’s flowers had their equivalent among the new produce of Argenteuil. Thanks to the rapid transport that linked the village with Paris, and thanks also to the rising prosperity of the capital, there was now a thriving market for flowers, which became a rapidly expanding enterprise in the village. Each in his own domain, the flower grower and the flower painter were taking produce to Paris. “Monet is little attracted by rustic scenes,” wrote Théodore Duret; “you will seldom find rural fields in his paintings, you will not find cattle or sheep in them, and even fewer peasants. He feels himself drawn towards decorated nature and urban scenes, and prefers to paint flower gardens, parks, and arbors.”56 Duret 1878, ed. 1885, pp. 71–72. One might add that raising and showing flowers had become a major preoccupation in the Paris region, patronized by the wealthy who, together with municipal governments, sponsored clubs, exhibitions, and prizes. See Phlipponneau 1956, passim.

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Description: Kitchen Gardens at l'Hermitage, Pontoise by Pissarro, Camille

264. Pissarro, Kitchen Garden at l’Hermitage, Pontoise, 1874. 54 × 65 cm. Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland.

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Description: The Luncheon (decorative panel) by Monet, Claude

265. Monet, The Luncheon (Decorative Panel), 1874, 162 × 203 cm. Musée d’Orsay.

Monet was constantly back and forth to Paris, and the garden pictures (and his active gardening) were certainly recompenses for his constant worries over finding a market for his art. His income had dropped off since 1873 and in 1876 totaled a little over 12,000 francs.57 Tucker 1982, p. 47, and Wildenstein 1974–85, vol. 1, p. 80. This was about six times the income of an Argenteuil worker (and does not count his borrowing), but Monet had been living high on the hog, and like any upwardly mobile entrepreneur, he had to scramble hard to raise money. He painted rather little that year at Argenteuil (the ten garden pictures were his principal effort there), and spent much of the time away. In the spring he busied himself with contributing to the second exhibition of the impressionists and with numerous appeals to friends and possible clients. He painted views of the Tuileries gardens and of the Parc Monceau (Pls. 141, 142) with the express hope of finding clients for these famous sites. That summer and fall he spent at Montgeron near the Yerres, south of Paris, where he painted a number of landscapes on the grounds of the château of one of his clients, Ernest Hoschedé. Hoschedé commissioned him to do four large “decorative panels” (now dispersed) that featured his estate. The comparison between the real château and its splendid gardens, and the modest rented house at Argenteuil, must have been constantly in Monet’s mind, but any envy of Hoschedé’s estate would have been tempered by the facts.

Ernest Hoschedé was a flamboyant, but disastrous businessman, who was in the process of ruining his family’s textile firm and of squandering the inheritance of his wife, Alice Raingo (the château was hers). An important patron of Monet and the other impressionists—Manet was his guest at Montgeron for two weeks in 1876—Hoschedé had been forced into two sales of his paintings in 1874 and 1875 and was in dire financial straits. He nonetheless lived on borrowed funds and retreated to Montgeron where “nature,” ostentatiously embellished, was his solace. Did Monet see through him, or were they enough alike that the painter also lived on Hoschedé’s hopes? In any event, Hoschedé went into complete bankruptcy in 1877, and the château was sold the following year. This was not the end of the Monet-Hoschedé alliance, however—far from it. Alice apparently became Monet’s mistress while he was at Montgeron, and her sixth child, Jean-Pierre, is presumed to be his.58 The relationship is summarized in Wildenstein 1974–85, vol. 1, p. 83. See pp. 80–83, 91–96, and passim for an account, subtle and suggestive, of the intertwined fates of Monet and Ernest Hoschedé. Like sailors roped together on a storm-tossed ship, the Monets and Hoschedés were thrown together. Monet was owed money by Hoschedé, and his market was affected by the financier’s sales of his paintings. In their different ways, both had to race about Paris in constant crisis, selling and borrowing where possible. Neither was willing to give up a high standard of living. At Argenteuil Monet bought wine from Bordeaux and Narbonne, had two maids and a part-time gardener, and maintained a studio-apartment in Paris. When he left the village in 1878, his creditors were still clamoring for payment; he did not acquit his laundress’s bill until 1891. Despite more staggering debts, the Hoschedés kept a household staff. In the summer of 1878 the two families joined households in Vétheuil, forty miles down the Seine from Paris, where the artist had found promising landscapes. Camille died the following year of a lingering illness, and Ernest took his distance. The new ménage was gradually accorded recognition, although they married only in 1892, after Ernest’s death.

By 1881, towards the end of the stay at Vétheuil, Monet had once more found consolation in gardening. In Monet’s Garden at Vétheuil (Pl. 266) we see again the oriental vases, stuffed with gladioli, brought from Argenteuil. Three children of the combined families look at us from the steeply rising steps, flanked by glorious sunflowers. We would hardly guess from this picture that this is a rented house, so firmly does the artist plant not only his vases and terraced ground, but also, with their aid, an idea of belonging. We would not guess, either, that a public road separated the garden from the house, any more than we sensed the nearby railroad when confronted by the dense blossoms of the Argenteuil garden. Monet’s landlady at Vétheuil had allowed him to cultivate the land across the road from the row of tightly joined houses. It sloped down towards the Seine, which is at our back in this picture. For his children and those of Alice, formerly proprietress of a real château, he could paint this splendid garden, a real place of beauty, and an imaginary estate. Two years later they moved further downstream to Giverny, where eventually Monet planted extensive gardens, detoured a stream to make a waterlily pool, built successively larger studios, and received the visits of journalists, poets, collectors from America and Japan, leading government figures, and the president of the Republic.

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Description: The Artist's Garden at Vétheuil by Monet, Claude

266. Monet, Monet’s Garden at Vétheuil, 1881. 150 × 120 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection.

1 Chevalier 1950, pp. 40–46. »

2 Sutcliffe 1970, p. 155. »

3 King 1868, pp. 194–95. »

4 Merlin 1967, p. 78, and Catinat 1967, pp. 99–102. »

5 Joanne 1856, p. 45; LaBédollière 1861, pp. 33–38. »

6 Department of the Seine, Commission de statistique municipale, Résultats du dénombrement de 1896 (Paris, 1899), p. 447. It rose to 24,300 by 1896. »

7 Manette Salomon (Paris, 1867), p. 98. »

8 LaBédollière 1861, p. 137. »

9 Joanne 1856, pp. 10–11. »

10 Georges Duval, Mémoires d’un parisien, première période (Paris, n.d.), passim, records these and other artists living in Asnières. Alexis became a friend of Signac and Seurat in the 1880s, and both painters worked at Asnières, as did Van Gogh. Seurat’s Bathing Place, Asnières of 1884 (London, National Gallery) gave enduring fame to the location. »

11 LaBédollière 1861, p. 138. For the story of Paris’s sewers and the Asnières outlet, see Pinkney 1958, pp. 132–42, and Tucker 1982, pp. 151–52. »

12 Barron 1886, p. 484. »

13 Goncourt 1956, vol. 1, entry for late August 1855. »

14 The painting is undated, but the costumes are of the late 1870s or early 1880s. See below, note 21. »

15 G.B., “Les Environs de Paris, Bougival,” L’Illustration 53 (24 April 1869): 267. »

16 King 1868, p. 169. »

17 Most effectively by Vincent J. Scully, in lectures and a book now in preparation. »

18 See note 15. »

19 Chapus 1854, p. 208. »

20 C.P., “La Grenouillère,” L’Illustration 54 (28 August 1869): 144. »

21 “I really have a daydream, a painting of bathing at the Grenouillère, for which I’ve done a few bad sketches [pochades], but it’s a daydream. Renoir, who just spent two months here, also wants to do this picture.” (To Bazille from Bougival, 25 September 1869, cited in Wildenstein 1974–85, vol. 1, p. 427.) Monet completed a much larger painting of the Grenouillère, presumably the one rejected by the Salon jury in 1870, and quite certainly the one, known only from old photographs, that disappeared from the Arnhold collection in Berlin during World War II. It is best reproduced in Gordon and Forge 1983, p. 45. Monet’s idea that the Grenouillère painting would make a good Salon entry was vindicated, in a manner of speaking, by the fact that Fernand Heilbuth’s picture of the site was accepted by the Salon jury of 1870. Known from an engraving (reproduced in Catinat 1967, p. 111), it shows the bathing spot with the elements generally disposed as they are in Renoir’s Winterthur canvas (Pl. 215). Heilbuth was a friend of Manet’s, but it is not known if his composition, conservative in structure and modeling, had any direct relationship with the impressionists’ pictures. »

22 Maupassant, in his well-known short stories La Femme de Paul (Paul’s Mistress) (1881) and Yvette (1884), treated the Grenouillère as a scandalous place, rife in prostitution. Art historians, citing passages from his racy fiction, have exaggerated the extent to which Seurin’s emporium was a den of iniquity in 1869. True, it was, like the Bal Mabille, a place where the rigors of bourgeois morality were absent, and where amorous play was encouraged by the very nature of communal activity. However, the Emperor’s visit in 1869, and the well-documented presence of families with children, should alone prevent us from converting a liberated environment into an open-air brothel. Furthermore, Maupassant’s stories were written more than a decade after Monet’s and Renoir’s paintings, and by then the character of the place had indeed changed. From Barron 1886, p. 494, we know that the Grenouillère was certainly over the hill by the mid-1880s. We should not be surprised: the volatility of Parisian entertainment virtually guaranteed that a decade’s time would bring about great alterations. »

23 In Monet’s Grenouillère, the colors on the surface were brushed over an understructure of large, sweeping, already dry strokes, which do not always coincide with the size or the direction of those that render the images. In the lower left, these subsurface strokes form a sail-like triangle, so it is possible that Monet was using an old canvas. However, he already had the habit of roughing in a composition with large brushes, letting the paint dry, and then working on top of this first layer. »

24 Monet’s structure, more immediately grasped than Renoir’s, has usually been praised as more “progressive,” because it seems to foretell the twentieth century’s love of rapidly encompassed and geometric surfaces. It is also seen, often unconsciously, as a more aggressive and “masculine” organization, compared to Renoir’s softer one. In male-dominated art history, that makes him the superior artist. These assumptions and value judgments, thoroughly embedded in the history of modern art, are virtually impossible to set aside, but one could as easily argue that Monet’s compositions lack subtlety, or that Renoir’s look forward to Vuillard and Kandinsky. A less value-oriented comparison would distinguish Renoir’s greater variety of hue and his tapestry effects from Monet’s chunkier vision. »

25 Wildenstein 1974–85, vol. 1, no. 138, correctly identified in the Ortiz-Patiño sale, Sotheby’s (New York), 9 May 1989. »

26 Manet owned Plate 211, but it is not known when or how he acquired it, nor whether others saw it while it was in his possession. »

27 Wildenstein 1974–85, vol. 1, no. 153, dates the picture 1870–71, but the palette and touch agree instead with the works done in the first months at Argenteuil, in 1872. Wildenstein speculates that the site is somewhere along the line to Saint-Germain, but it is possible also that it was in the Bois de Boulogne, on its eastern edge, facing the talus that formed the city’s fortified wall there. The Circular Railway ran just behind the embankment on its own high elevation, before it curved over to cross the Seine on the Auteuil bridge. In 1878, Sisley painted the double-decker trains crossing that bridge, so we know the quaint cars ran along that line. »

28 For this, as for so many aspects of Monet’s work at Argenteuil, see Tucker 1982, pp. 70–76, and passim. Although the association with post-war rebuilding had been noted before, Tucker is the first to have shown that the bridge pictures are limited to Monet’s early years at Argenteuil, that his later subjects there are very different, and that these groupings should be interpreted in the light of Monet’s shifting attitudes, as well as of the history of the town itself. »

29 “Steam,” in Fables (Paris, 1855), p. 203. »

30 Merlin 1967, p. 80. »

31 Morisot’s painting, not previously identified with Villeneuve, once belonged to Mary Cassatt; it was sold at Christie’s, New York, 16 May 1986, no. 253. »

32 Joanne 1870, p. 645. »

33 Tucker 1982 gives an excellent account of the postwar mood that provides a context for Monet’s pictures of Argenteuil, and Clark 1985, a perceptive analysis of why labor and work are not shown in those paintings. »

34 Paris dans sa splendeur, vol. 2, 1861, p. 32, and Joanne 1870, p. 645. »

35 Chapus 1854, pp. 3–4, 194. »

36 Sections on boating in guide books of the early 1860s mention Argenteuil briefly or not at all; Asnières dominates their accounts, as does rowing. By the end of the decade, Argenteuil and sailing are given important place, e.g., Joanne 1863, pp. 616–18, and Joanne 1870, pp. 644–46. »

37 LaBédollière 1861, p. 135. »

38 On the Beach (Musée d’Orsay) and The Swallows (Pl. 282). The model in Boating has not been identified. »

39 Huysmans 1883, “Le Salon de 1879,” p. 36. Modern historians have pointed out that Leenhoff originally held the rope in his hand, and that by moving it to the boat cleat, Manet flattened the composition in a japoniste manner. However, the original position of the rope would have produced an even flatter zig-zag; the change opened out a space between helmsman and sail. No commentator seems to have noticed the curious piece of wood that Manet painted along the bottom of the composition, slanting up towards the right. Is it perhaps an oar laid athwart the boat, or the edge of a piece of decking (unorthodox structure, in that case)? Furthermore, the boat is an old-fashioned kind, like the one on the left in Argenteuil (Pl. 239), not one of the sleek yachts that Monet and Manet otherwise painted, with their curving decks and cockpits. The significance of this has also escaped comment. »

40 The two highly colored paintings were probably painted after Boating, The River at Argenteuil (London, The Dowager Lady Aberconway), and Sailboats at Argenteuil (Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie), for these three have a less contrasted palette closer to the work of 1872–73. Clark 1985, pp. 164–73, makes astute observations on the relation of brushwork and palette in Argenteuil to the images they construct. »

41 Manet must have borrowed Monet’s picture, or studied it assiduously. It is as though Manet projected the studio boat onto Monet’s composition, covering up the center but preserving left and right sides. »

42 The other, Wildenstein 1974–85, vol. 1, no. 326 (private collection), was also painted in 1874. »

43 Martin 1894, p. 38. He follows this with a description of the mad rush in late evening to the train station, then the crowded ride back to the city, further horrors to be avoided by the suburban dweller. »

44 Maupassant identifies the canotières’ dress in Yvette and other stories. »

45 G.B., “Les Environs de Paris, Chatou—Le Vésinet,” L’Illustration 53 (22 May 1869): 333. For population figures, see Joanne 1856, pp. 44–45, and Barron 1886, p. 497. »

46 Barron 1886, pp. 493–94. »

47 Delvau 1862, pp. 283–84, 286. »

48 Identified in Catinat 1952, p. 39. Eventually, through a punning transformation, it became La Merle Franc. »

49 The Seine at Asnières, 1879 (National Gallery, London). Despite the traditional title, Renoir’s site does not accord with Asnières, but it has not yet been identified. »

50 Manette Salomon (Paris, 1867), pp. 98–99. »

51 Puvis’s canvas is a small version of the picture exhibited in 1882, done for the Parisian town house of the painter Léon Bonnat (now in the Musée Bonnat, Bayonne). »

52 Morford 1867, p. 240. »

53 Letter to Eva Gonzalès, 23 September 1981, cited in Manet 1983, p. 476. »

54 Her features are indistinct, and some have worried over her identity, even conjecturing that she might be a maid. No maid would be shown dressed that way, however, and the proud father and husband must surely have wished to represent his family, as he did in so many other paintings. Recent historians (Isaacson 1978, pp. 205–206, and Tucker 1982, pp. 135–42) have said that several of Monet’s garden paintings at Argenteuil, including The Luncheon (Pl. 265), indicate the artist’s growing estrangement from his wife, but this might be a case of reading biography back into the pictures. Over the course of this decade, Monet was gradually leaving virtually all figure painting behind; besides, his failure to paint his future second wife Alice Hoschedé could hardly be put down to estrangement from her. »

55 Reclus 1866, p. 377. »

56 Duret 1878, ed. 1885, pp. 71–72. One might add that raising and showing flowers had become a major preoccupation in the Paris region, patronized by the wealthy who, together with municipal governments, sponsored clubs, exhibitions, and prizes. See Phlipponneau 1956, passim. »

57 Tucker 1982, p. 47, and Wildenstein 1974–85, vol. 1, p. 80. »

58 The relationship is summarized in Wildenstein 1974–85, vol. 1, p. 83. See pp. 80–83, 91–96, and passim for an account, subtle and suggestive, of the intertwined fates of Monet and Ernest Hoschedé. »

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