These paintings must be
looked upon as ‘esquisses’ or ‘pochades’ (pochade = preliminary
sketch).
Ref. to John House ‘Monet –
Nature into Art’,
…the two versions of ‘La Grenoullière’ are
those two paintings that Monet himself talked about as ‘bad
pochades’. House writes: “Many of the less highly finished canvases,
mostly dating from the 1880s and 1890s, that Monet signed and sold
late in his life were probably originally kept as esquisses,
paintings which were a comparative success in Monet’s own terms, but
which he did not regard as sufficiently finished for him to put on
the market at the date of execution.”
Monet also used the term
pochade frequently to characterise his rapid sketches of
particularly fleeting effects, sometimes painted on smaller canvases
than normal, and thus conceived from the start as pochades. His
earliest recorded use of pochade refers to his paintings of La
Grenouillère: “I have a dream, a tableau of the bathing place of La
Grenouillère, for which I’ve done some bad pochades, but it is a
dream.” He showed his loyalty to his quickest and most direct
notations of nature by exhibiting canvases with the subtitle
impression or esquisse, (House chapter 9, p.161).