Luncheon of the Boating Party

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Luncheon of the Boating Party: Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir Oil Painting - Luncheon of the Boating Party

Keywords: Luncheon, Boating, Party

Work Overview: Luncheon of the Boating Party
Artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Year 1880–1881
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 129.9 cm × 172.7 cm (51 in × 68 in)
Location The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–1881, French: Le déjeuner des canotiers) is a painting by French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Included in the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition in 1882, it was identified as the best painting in the show by three critics.[1] It was purchased from the artist by the dealer-patron Paul Durand-Ruel and bought in 1923 (for $125,000) from his son by industrialist Duncan Phillips, who spent a decade in pursuit of the work.[2][3] It is now in The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. It shows a richness of form, a fluidity of brush stroke, and a flickering light.

The painting, combining figures, still-life, and landscape in one work, depicts a group of Renoir's friends relaxing on a balcony at the Maison Fournaise restaurant along the Seine river in Chatou, France. The painter and art patron, Gustave Caillebotte, is seated in the lower right. Renoir's future wife, Aline Charigot, is in the foreground playing with a small dog, an affenpinscher; she replaced an earlier woman who sat for the painting but with whom Renoir became annoyed.[3] On the table is fruit and wine.

The diagonal of the railing serves to demarcate the two halves of the composition, one densely packed with figures, the other all but empty, save for the two figures of the proprietor's daughter Louise-Alphonsine Fournaise and her brother, Alphonse Fournaise, Jr, which are made prominent by this contrast. In this painting Renoir has captured a great deal of light. The main focus of light is coming from the large opening in the balcony, beside the large singleted man in the hat. The singlets of both men in the foreground and the table-cloth all work together to reflect this light and send it through the whole composition.

As he often did in his paintings, Renoir included several of his friends in Luncheon of the Boating Party.[3] Identification of the sitters was made in 1912 by Julius Meier-Graefe.[4] Among them are the following:[5]

The seamstress Aline Charigot, who is holding an affenpinscher dog, sits near the bottom left of the composition. Renoir married her in 1890, and they had three sons.
Charles Ephrussi—wealthy amateur art historian, collector, and editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts—appears wearing a top hat in the background. The younger man to whom Ephrussi appears to be speaking, more casually attired in a brown coat and cap, may be Jules Laforgue, his personal secretary and also a poet and critic.
Actress Ellen Andrée drinks from a glass in the center of the composition. Seated across from her is Baron Raoul Barbier, former mayor of colonial Saigon.
Placed within but peripheral to the party are the proprietor's daughter Louise-Alphonsine Fournaise and her brother, Alphonse Fournaise, Jr., both sporting traditional straw boaters and appearing to the left side of the image. Alphonsine is the smiling woman leaning on the railing; Alphonse, who was responsible for the boat rental, is the leftmost figure.
Also wearing boaters are figures appearing to be Renoir's close friends Eugène Pierre Lestringez, a bureaucrat, and Paul Lhote, himself an artist. Renoir depicts them flirting with the actress Jeanne Samary in the upper righthand corner of the painting.
In the right foreground, Gustave Caillebotte wears a white boater's shirt and flat-topped straw boater's hat as he sits backwards in his chair next to actress Angèle Legault and Italian journalist Adrien Maggiolo. An art patron, painter, and important figure in the impressionist circle, Caillebotte was also an avid boatman and drew on that subject for several works.

At the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition in 1882, the painting generally received praise from critics. "It is fresh and free without being too bawdy," wrote Paul de Charry in Le Pays, March 10, 1882. In La Vie Moderne (March 11, 1882), Armand Silvestre wrote, "...one of the best things [Renoir] has painted...There are bits of drawing that are completely remarkable, drawing- true drawing- that is a result of the juxtaposition of hues and not of line. It is one of the most beautiful pieces that this insurrectionist art by Independent artists has produced." Alternatively, Le Figaro published Albert Wolff's comment on March 2, 1882: "If he had learned to draw, Renoir would have a very pretty picture..."

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Luncheon of the Boating Party by Pierre-Auguste Renoir remains the best known and most popular work of art at The Phillips Collection, just as Duncan Phillips imagined it would be when he bought it in 1923. The painting captures an idyllic atmosphere as Renoir's friends share food, wine, and conversation on a balcony overlooking the Seine at the Maison Fournaise restaurant in Chatou. Parisians flocked to the Maison Fournaise to rent rowing skiffs, eat a good meal, or stay the night.

The painting also reflects the changing character of French society in the mid- to late 19th century. The restaurant welcomed customers of many classes, including businessmen, society women, artists, actresses, writers, critics, seamstresses, and shop girls. This diverse group embodied a new, modern Parisian society.

Renoir seems to have composed this complicated scene without advance studies or underdrawing. He spent months making numerous changes to the canvas, painting the individual figures when his models were available, and adding the striped awning along the top edge. Nonetheless, Renoir retained the freshness of his vision, even as he revised, rearranged, and crafted an exquisite work of art.

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he arrangement of Luncheon of the Boating Party represents a relatively new Impressionist movement as well as the changing character of French society due to the industrial revolution. Renoir craftily uses shape, space, color and texture to create the scene he imagined. The figures and bottles add shape to the canvas and the overlapping of bodies gives a sense of space.

Renoir also makes his composition more effective by adopting elements of design such as balance, repetition and harmony. A sense of movement is realized through the actions and expression of the cast and repetition is achieved through the curves of the gazebo cover, the stripes, the posts in the railing and the yellow straw hats which guide the viewers eye around the canvas.

The artists combination of thickly applied brushstrokes and more delicate ones adds to the composition, and specks of red and white make the painting easy on the eye.

In terms of balance, Renoir is extremely clever and succeeds in balancing two figures on the left with twelve on the right. By tilting the floorboards, the artist allows characters in the upper-right background to be easily visible and this adds to the feeling of intimacy and informality.

There is no evidence suggesting that Renoir created any preparatory drawings for Luncheon of the Boating Party or that he made any preliminary sketches on the canvas. Instead he developed his compositions as he went along, a common Impressionist approach.

To organize this arrangement its believed that Renoir gathered most of his subjects at the Maison Fournaise early on. He made several compositional changes when painting the piece, one of the major additions being the striped awning which works to further enforce the feeling of intimacy. Furthermore, the greenery emphasizes the somewhat cozy atmosphere.

The colors adopted by Renoir are very rich and he contrasts the deep blue and green with vivid red and greens. Brimming with color this painting reflects both the time period and Impressionist style.

Texture is represented by the figures´ clothing as well as Renoir´s applied brushstrokes. Renoir´s palette also contains many golden tones and the women´s fair skin is reddened from the sun and the hats and bare arms are further evidence of a warm day. Techniques of blending and layering to convey warmth and glowing skin with subtle tints of blue and green are fairly traditional.

There is a great deal of light throughout the composition of Luncheon of the Boating Party. The main light source is the opening in the balcony and the beaming sunlight is reflected by the table cloth and the vests of the two men in the foreground. This canvas captures the momentary effects of changing light and color.

In traditional Impressionist style Renoir depicted a scene from modern life and based it in a place he knew well - the Restaurant Fournaise. Chatou was one of Renoir's beloved settings and Luncheon of the Boating Party is a romanticized portrait of his friends enjoying a Sunday afternoon on the balcony of the restaurant. His intention was to take a normal scene and create a modern day party that portrayed the youth and beauty of his friends.

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In 1880, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, age 41, wrote to a friend that he was in a riverside town near Paris painting oarsmen. He'd been "itching" to do it for a long time: "I'm not getting any younger," he wrote, "and didn't want to defer this little festivity." Now that painting, Luncheon of the Boating Party, is the star of a new exhibition at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.

The painting shows 14 young people having a wonderful time on a sunny balcony overlooking the Seine. Lunch is over — there are half-full wine bottles, golden grapes and pears on the white tablecloth — and now they're relaxing, talking and flirting.

"I really don't know any painting in Renoir's work that surpasses the boating party," says Phillips Collection curator Eliza Rathbone. "He's at the height of his powers. Renoir has really been painting in an impressionist style for more than a decade, and he's ready to surpass himself."

The artist asked friends to pose for him — pretty models, actresses, a wealthy painter, the restaurant's owner — but they probably never posed together. "I think it was a logistical challenge bringing 14 people together," Rathbone says. "We doubt he ever did quite that."

The Phillips show explains how Renoir got them all onto his large canvas — because they weren't all cooperative. "One he found so impossible he had to dismiss her from the project," Rathbone says. X-rays and infrared tests show that Renoir scratched her out and painted someone else in her place. His new, lovely substitute sits a bit apart on the left, in a straw bonnet with red flowers. She's wearing a blue dress and nuzzling an adorable little dog. She's based on a 21-year-old country girl named Aline Charigot.

Charigot was a waitress in the creamery across the street from where Renoir lived. She hadn't known him very long when she posed for Luncheon of the Boating Party, but he had fallen for her and they became an item. "I think that's why she has the role that she does in the painting," Rathbone says, "because you wouldn't ever be in any doubt which figure he was in love with. ... He's the only impressionist that does romance; he shows romance in his art."

Charigot became one of Renoir's favorite models. She was also his lover, and finally his wife.

Diagonally across from Charigot, farther back in the painting, another pretty woman stands between two attentive men. She also wears a flowered hat — black, to match her dress, which has white satin cuffs. She's thought to be Jeanne Samary, a famous actress. According to Rathbone, she had a big reputation, and it got even bigger when she became engaged to the son of a banker. The gossip columns were full of words about the engagement because his proper parents disapproved. In the painting, Samary covers her ears with gloved hands. "Perhaps she's trying to block out the gossip," Rathbone says.

A brown bowler hat covers the head of another Renoir pal in the painting. The man, Baron Raoul Barbier, talks to a rosy-cheeked girl and sits with his back to us. He had served as the mayor of Saigon (France ruled Vietnam in those days), but in 1880 he lived near the restaurant and stored Renoir's big canvas at his home.

For 16 months, Renoir traveled back and forth from his Paris studio to the restaurant in Chatou to work on the painting. During that time, according to Renoir biographer Barbara Ehrlich White, he had a bad accident. "He fell off a bicycle in February of 1880 and he broke his right arm — and he was right-handed." After the accident, the intrepid artist put brushes in his left hand and kept right on painting. The resulting canvas became his masterpiece.

Luncheon of the Boating Party is the center of The Phillips Collection show (up through early January). It's surrounded by paintings of and by some of the other folks at that long ago lunch — a delightful reunion of art and discoveries.

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Not since the Venetian painters of the High Renaissance has the world seen such glowing opulence in painting. But whereas the Venetians generally found their inspiration in the myths and lore of ancient times, Renoir's genius transmutes the common occurrences of everyday life into Olympian grandeur. These young gods and goddesses are friends of the painter, persons well known in Parisian art circles at the time. Aline Charigot, a favorite model whom Renoir married shortly after this picture was painted, sits at the left toying with the dog; the other girl at the table is another favorite model, Angele, a lady of colorful repute. Caillebotte, wealthy engineer, talented spare-time painter - who early began to acquire his great collection of Impressionist paintings, which is now the pride of the Louvre (after a frenzy of opposition to the bequest in the 1890s), sits astride the chair. The lady who so kittenishly closes her ears to a naughty jest is probably the actress Jeanne Samary, painted by Renoir many times. The identity of most of the others is also known.

We have already mentioned Renoir's felicity in inventing graceful, vivacious poses - poses that always seem as though this is the way people ought to look. We have mentioned his knack for enlivening his canvases with piquant notes- a face that emerges unexpectedly, a play of fingers, bits of still life, bonnets, ribbons, beards, stripes, flowers. As is customary in Renoir's large compositions (and the Venetians'), one side of the canvas is rich in things big and near; the other side presents a view into the distance - in this case, a breathtaking piece of Impressionist virtuosity.

Foreground and background are related in part by the awning, which in its striping combines the hues of the foliage with the warmer tones of the group; its delightful serpentine edge echoes freely the curves in the group, and the breeze that flutters the valance sweeps also across the balcony. The feeling of animation is given in many subtle and striking ways: for example, the perspective of the balcony leads the eye to the upper right, but the open visual path into the distance offers an opposed attraction. And all the while the eye is cunningly led back, through relationships of color - the spotting of blacks, for instance; and through line relationships, over backs, across heads, or following edges of color or light areas. And within every detail, no matter how small or casual, what a wonderful enrichment! This one canvas alone would be enough to assure a painter immortality.

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Mealtimes are fairly well represented in fine art. Wayne Thiebaud had an affinity for deserts. Manet gave us images of Breakfast in the Studio and Luncheon in the Grass. And I think Da Vinci may have a dining scene in his oeuvre as well. And then there’s Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s instantly recognizable scene of a convivial bunch of diners enjoying a summertime meal alfresco. Completed in 1881, Luncheon of the Boating Party is one of the most famous midday meals committed to canvas, but it’s curious to note that in spite of the title, there’s precious little food to be seen. Taking a cue from Clara Peller, I have to ask: where’s the lunch?

“It’s like a painting about the most perfect meal that ever was—but you can’t tell what most of it was,” says Phillips Collection Chief Curator Eliza Rathbone. By the time we see the table, all that’s left are a few not-quite-empty bottles of wine and a compotier of fruit such as grapes and pears, perhaps a peach or two. “It’s the end of the meal. And I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s such a beguiling picture. It’s of that time that comes when everyone has had a delicious meal, they’ve all gathered, they’ve focused on the food and now they’re just focusing on each other and this beautiful day and they don’t want it to be over. And we’ve all had those kinds of experiences where you want to linger and those are the best meals we ever have.”

The scene takes place at the Maison Fournaise, an open-air café on the Ile de Chatou where people of all social classes mixed and mingled as they enjoyed their leisure time away from the bustle of the city. In its heyday the Maison was a popular hangout for artists. It remains open for business, although the scenic views have changed a bit since Renoir’s time.

But it seems Renoir wasn’t much of a foodie. In a memoir, son Jean Renoir, who made a name for himself as a film director, remembers his father preferring simple fare, even when finer things—like veal and soufflés and custards—were laid on the table. In terms of food as a subject for his paintings, actual foodstuffs crop up most often in his still lifes, and even then, his attentions turned to raw ingredients instead of finished dishes. “He could paint a beautiful onion,” Rathbone says. “They’re the ingredients in their most natural form, which is their most beautiful moment. Let’s face it, a chopped onion isn’t nearly as beautiful as an onion whole. I think Monet and Caillebotte did more prepared food in their still lifes than Renoir did. We have a wonderful still life in the collection that’s a ham and it’s a marvelous subject in Gauguin’s hands. He makes the most beautiful ham you ever saw.”

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