Monet Bathers at La Grenouillãƒâ¨re the Frog Pond 1869 the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York

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Perspective

Perspective Discussion of news topics with a point of view, including narratives past individuals regarding their ain experiences.

Broken brushstrokes

In this gorgeous early Monet painting, some see a cesspool of sex and vice

Claude Monet's "La Grenouillère," 1869. On view at the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art; H. O. Havemeyer Collection)

I year earlier French republic'south Second Empire collapsed and Paris was besieged past Prussians, three years before he painted "Impression, Sunrise" and five years before the start impressionist exhibition, Claude Monet painted "La Grenouillère," now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With its rapid, broken brushstrokes (apparent particularly in the h2o), and its rendering of the physical globe equally colored light rather than meticulously modeled space, this 1869 work is oftentimes celebrated as a turning point in the history of art: i of the very first identifiably "impressionist" paintings.

There were, however, precedents. And Monet himself talked down the canvas every bit a bad pochade — a hastily executed, unresolved work. (His bigger, more resolved painting of the same field of study went missing during World War Ii and is presumed destroyed.)

The scene is La Grenouillère (the Frog Pond), a bathing spot with a floating restaurant on the Seine near Chatou, but west of Paris. It's the summertime of '69. Monet is down on his luck, destitute. He's staying nearby with his before longhoped-for wife, Camille; he comes to La Grenouillère to pigment alongside his pal Pierre- Auguste Renoir.

To our optics, the image looks reposeful, soothing, sedate, like the opening of a Merchant Ivory moving picture. It was actually a cesspool of sexual practice and vice.

Guy de Maupassant set up his story "Femme Fatale" at La Grenouillère. In the next park, he wrote, "busty women with peroxided hair and nipped-in waists could be seen, made upwards to the nines with blood red lips and black-kohled optics." The eatery'southward patrons kept an eye on the freshly hooked-upwardly couples who cruised by in pocket-sized, rented boats.

Maupassant noted the suffocating summer heat and tedious-moving current in this "dead branch" of the Seine and the ambient smell of spilled drinks, inexpensive perfume and talc. He wrote that the place "reeked of vice and abuse and the dregs of Parisian society." Those who congregated at that place were "cheats, con-men and cheap hacks" who, he said, "mingled with other small-time crooks and speculators, dabblers in dubious ventures, frauds, pimps and racketeers."

Maupassant'southward passage reminded me of Grandmaster Flash'southward description, in his 1982 masterpiece "The Message," of "the number-book takers/ Thugs, pimps and pushers and the big moneymakers/ Drivin' large cars, spendin' twenties and tens/ And you lot'll wanna abound up to be only like them, huh/ Smugglers, scramblers, burglars, gamblers/ Pickpocket peddlers, even panhandlers."

A free comparison? Sure. Only I'yard trying to accept you briefly away from received wisdom regarding Monet and impressionism. When you lot become to an impressionist exhibition, yous tend to imbibe the hagiographical, souvenir shop version. When you study impressionism in college, you lot're drilled in Marxist interpretations of the social inequities these dearest pictures of everyday life are said to reveal (or repress).

Simply Monet and Renoir were out in the earth, with their bodies, their backstories, their hunger, their senses. Intoxicated by what they saw, they felt moved and energized to invent a new style of painting that might capture it with the immediacy it warranted — to brand what they saw coinciding with the inner urgency of their ain lives.

And then, rather than reduce their experience to fit either our political theories or our predilection for kitsch, why not first credit their intoxication? What did Monet see at La Grenouillère? What did it experience like to be there?

It had something to do with the calorie-free and the water and the atmosphere — that much we know. Just besides … What a place! Paris, with its gaslight glamour, its yawning new boulevards, its tremors of social discord, only downward the river. Hustlers on the prowl upwardly and downwards the riverbank. Prostitution rife. Revolution in the air. An empire about to fall.

If you lot were to film it, you wouldn't choose Merchant Ivory. You'd cull Martin Scorsese.

Groovy Works, In Focus

A series featuring art critic Sebastian Smee's favorite works in permanent collections around the United States. "They are things that move me. Role of the fun is trying to figure out why."

Sebastian Smee

Sebastian Smee is a Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic at The Washington Post and the writer of "The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals and Breakthroughs in Modernistic Art." He has worked at the Boston Globe, and in London and Sydney for the Daily Telegraph (U.K.), the Guardian, the Spectator, and the Sydney Morning Herald.