She is the likable Parisian girl in the Bois . . . seeking the shade not for its coolness and solitude, but for the entertainments there: the ball, the pleasure garden, the fashionable restaurant, the freak tree converted into a dining room. . . . [Renoir's] heroine has nothing rustic about her except her features. She is a brunette, ruddy complexioned, plump, vigorous and healthy, and not lacking in spirit, I imagine. Her eyes express clearly her native mischievousness and her incisive working-class [popu- 52 laire] perceptiveness. The imagery of amorous excursions from Paris had a significant artis- tic ancestry, and even when no precise site was shown, critics were often ready to identify such images with particular places and to invoke their reputation when interpreting the pictures. Courbet's Young Women of the Banks of the Seine, Summer [FIGURE 8], Manet's Dejeuner sur I'herbe (Paris, Musee d'Orsay), and Renoir's Bather with a Griffon [FIGURE 7] had made explicit the theme of the secluded island in the river, reached by rowboat, although without identifiable topographical details. Courbet's canvas, in particular, was at once associated with the islands in the Seine. Bather with a Griffon, shown at the 1870 Salon, was presumably the ambitious canvas that emerged from Renoir's work at La Grenouillere in the autumn of 1869, a fascinating indication of the difference he perceived between a landscape study and a significant exhibition picture. Renoir had in 1866 painted a canvas, Outing in a Rowboat [FIGURE 31], which made explicit the link between such outings and the flirtatious excursion into the woods that forms the subject of La Promenade. Such images picked up on the traditional imagery of the "isle of love," with its artistic reminiscences of Watteau's Embarcation for the Isle of Cythera (versions in Paris, Musee du Louvre, and Berlin, Staatliche Museen); these stereotypes were also alluded to 53 in contemporary literature. The particular resonance of La Grenouillere and the lie de Croissy emerges from a review by Theophile Gautier fils of James Tissot's The Secret (Confidence) [FIGURE 32] at the 1867 Salon. Although the picture carries no clear indication of the site shown (beyond the presence of a riverbank), Gautier con- fidently located the setting in his imaginative re-creation of the scene: 6 4