The Duck Pond

Renoir and Monet began portraying the same landscape in 1869, when they simultaneously painted at the famous waterside café La Grenouillère (The Frogpond) at Bougival. This collaboration has often been analyzed and used to point out the real aesthetic differences between the two artists - Monet, the painter of light and water, and Renoir, the painter of the human form.

The two artists painted together on many subsequent occasions. In 1873, they made a single excursion during which Renoir painted two landscapes and Monet completed one. The Reves "Duck Pond" is one of this trio of paintings; Renoir's second also resides in Dallas, in a private collection. Monet's single canvas remains in a Parisian private collection. The Reves Renoir and the Monet have often been compared in print, most powerfully by John Rewald, the preeminent historian of Impressionism and the author of the standard history of the movement. When shown side by side on a printed page, the two works appear startlingly similar, each artist having succumbed to a desire to show nature in all its visual complexity. The tree branches seem to move in the breeze, and the surface of the pond trembles in an agitated fashion. Both pictures have a restiveness that many early critics of Impressionism found at once ugly and resolutely modern. In their view, the nervousness of the paintings was an analogue for the ills of contemporary urban society.

Interestingly, no student of landscape imagery has located the motif painted by Renoir and Monet, which is most likely in the region of Argenteuil, where Monet lived and where both painters worked in the summers of 1873 and 1874. Fortunately, Monet dated his painting, allowing us to position all works in the first of these two collaborative summers. Their friend, Camille Pissarro, must have seen these works, because he began his own variants of the composition in the summer of 1874, when he painted a series representing a duck pond in rural Brittany. All three artists relished the picturesque activity of such farm-pond scenes and painted them as an alternative to their more famous representations of bourgeois flower gardens and leisure boating.

"Impressionist Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture from the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection," page 53