Bathers at La Grenouillère, 1869 Claude Monet (1840-1926)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Claude Monet also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Bathers at La Grenouillère is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

A flotilla of rowing boats crowds the foreground, their green-black hulls overlapping like cards hastily thrown down. Pale oars cross them in sharp diagonals. One ochre-brown boat, set among cooler greens, provides a small flare of warmth. Beyond this emphatic barrier, a narrow footbridge cuts the canvas almost exactly in two. Bathers at la Grenouillere is ostensibly about people enjoying the Seine, yet the boats seem more substantial than anyone present.

Painted outdoors in the summer of 1869, this National Gallery, London, canvas has the urgency of an encounter. Claude Monet gives us no gracious route into the scene. Across the middle, upright figures interrupt the bridge, while the horizon is squeezed beneath the upper edge. Nothing settles around a single focal point. Even the trees refuse to behave as a conventional frame, spreading instead as dense, loosely worked masses of olive, viridian and smoky grey.

Look at the women in dark bathing costumes on the right. A few blunt strokes establish hats, torsos and bare legs; their reflections descend as broken black marks. White, cerulean and slate-coloured touches skip across the river, turning water into a restless mosaic of light and shadow. Much of it is surprisingly dark. Where sunlight catches, however, the paint brightens abruptly, like the flash from a moving wave. Thick lines define the boats, while broad, flat patches abbreviate foliage, clothing and distant shore. Rather than modelling solid forms, Monet builds equivalents for sensations that may vanish between one brushstroke and the next.

During the 1860s, La Grenouillère became a popular weekend escape from Paris, reached by rail or coach and offering swimming, boating, dining and dancing. Its mixed, slightly raffish public made it an ideal subject for modern life. Monet regarded this rapid study as preparation for a larger Salon picture, though its apparent incompleteness is now part of its authority. Renoir painted beside him here, pursuing the same motif. Compared with more polished exhibition painting, both artists were testing how little description a scene required before it felt immediate.

For Claude Monet, that answer lies chiefly in colour and rhythm. He notices the river not as a mirror but as something perpetually fractured. Perhaps one can hear the slap of water against timber and the distant chatter under the trees. Standing before it, the air feels damp and warm. What remains most affecting is its lack of ceremony: leisure appears fragmentary, crowded and fleeting, already becoming memory as the paint lands.