The two paintings traditionally held to have launched the Impressionist style in the summer of 1869 are Monet’s and Renoir’s depictions of La Grenouillère, a popular bathing spot near Chatou, on the river Seine. In the first two decades of Impressionism (1869-1889) the Seine came to play a central role in the development of the new style.

The study of flickering summer light on the surface of the water but also the many human activities on or beside the river: bathing, rowing, sailing, strolling, working, lunching, flirting and open-air painting will become key subjects in the work of Monet, Manet, Renoir, Sisley, Caillebotte and also Georges Seurat among others.

The Seine came to represent a new vision of leisure and happiness, an escape from the crowds, pollution but also the formal conventions of the city, a new territory of freedom for the urban dweller of the industrial era. In our talk we will follow the evolution of the depiction of the river from the first open-air sketches of the Grenouillère to the monumental compositions created by Seurat in the 1880s in Bathing at Asnières and the Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte.