Bushra Muzaffar
Khan
Art 1/B2
10 December 2015
La Grenouillère 1869, Claude Monet, pg 454 in the Visual Experience textbook Claude Monet’s La Grenouillère is a 74.6 x 99.7 centimeter oil on canvas painting completed in 1869. There are figures in the middle ground standing and sitting on a platform-type thing in the middle of a body of water while some of the people are actually inside the water. The foreground has 3 empty dark green colored rowing boats, one of the boats on the right is right next to a dock-type area. It’s a rectangular covered platform with 5 women standing. The background of La Grenouillère has light green trees growing. There is definite visible texture in the trees and the water, they both look realistic, the water even
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La Grenouillère has people that appear to be talking and laughing and swimming which all implies movement, and because there are people scattered throughout the middle ground, the audience directs their eyesight from one end of the painting to the other. There is also proportion in the painting because the people are all the same size and aren’t bigger than the trees or very small. The objects all together in the painting elicit a relaxed, happy mood. Towards the foreground, the colors used are much darker and seem like they’re under a shade while the background seems like the sun is shining on it, which is a direct contrast of light and …show more content…
Also the mood is pretty positive and I like how realistic it feels so I can also relate to it in that way. To me, the painting almost seems to be saying that the friendship of the people depicted in the picture is as fresh and indispensable as the water needed to make up a lake. Or that it’s crystal clear how relaxed the people in the painting are. I believe that the painting is focused on the water which is related to cleanliness and life, put together with bunch of women who seem close to each other, I believe La Grenouillère is about a specific village/group of people who come together to join in a movement of becoming pure and clean in the clear blue waters. Reading more into the painting, I learnt that La Grenouillère is from Monet’s dream about the bathing units of La Grenouillrè, which basically was a middle-class spa resort, floating café, and boating establishment in