During the summer of 1869, Monet and Renoir painted together at La Grenouillère, a slightly raffish resort on the river Seine some 12 kilometres west of Paris. It had become a popular weekend retreat from the city during the 1860s.
Monet made several oil sketches at the resort, including this picture, in preparation for a large painting of the site that he planned to exhibit at the Salon of 1870. Painted quickly and technically quite crude, these studies have a directness and immediacy that could not be achieved in the studio. Monet was painting what he saw, without any attempt to tidy up the scene. Rather than a documentary record of La Grenouillère, he presents a summary of his own experience of fleeting visual effects or impressions that changed moment to moment. As pictures in their own right, these sketches were an important step towards Impressionism.