A River Sketch That Needs Width

By ReplicArt Studio

How a hand-painted oil painting of Monet’s La Grenouillère looks in a room depends on width. The painting only works if it stays a river. The Met canvas is 74.6 by 99.7 centimeters, painted in 1869, and it hangs in Gallery 818. The water, the boats, and the little island called the Camembert have to keep their stretch. Crop it toward a square and the picture becomes a postcard of a day on the Seine.

Monet wrote on 25 September 1869: “I do have a dream, a painting, the baths of La Grenouillère, for which I have made some bad sketches, but it is only a dream.” The Met picture is one of those surviving sketches. The paint is meant to look decided in a hurry. That hurry is the surface.

The painting we hang is the Met canvas. It is not Bathers at La Grenouillère, the Monet that has hung in London. Same summer. Same stretch of river. Different angle. The Met view keeps the Camembert islet and the floating restaurant. Bathers cuts boats and a walkway, the islet off the edge. If you have the London picture in your head, you will hang the wrong width.

In a room the job is the horizontal. Above a sofa or a long sideboard the water has to read as water, not as a stamp. Ordinary daylight on broken color does the rest. Morning sun picks up the whites in the boats. Lamps at night flatten the greens. The surface of the oil painting keeps changing because it is paint.

We paint the Met canvas in several sizes, all in the same proportion. The small ones stay close to a study. The larger ones ask for a wall that can take a river.

The original is at The Met. A hand-painted oil painting will not stand in for Gallery 818. It can put that same width of water into a private room if the copyist keeps the islet, the restaurant, and the stretch.