The Luncheon of the Boating Party (Le Déjeuner des Canotiers), 1880-81, oil on canvas.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1844-1919, French. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
The artist’s friends at the Maison Fournaise in Chatou on the Seine, France.
As complex as this painting is, it was painted without underdrawings. Instead the painter painted and repainted the characters and the constituent parts of this painting on the canvas until he was satisfied.
A masterful deployment of yellow, the first colour the eyes sees. And of orange.
This painting is like a jewel box which has been set down in an enclosure of trees and bushes.
Your eyes travel along the yellows at the tops of the trees from one end of the painting to the other.
Your eyes move back and forth among these flora whose greens are flecked with yellow.
Joining the gathering of people, your eyes move back and forth between the image’s five yellow anchor points:
the boater of the man standing, his back arched, on the left of the picture;
the young woman at the center of this painting: the daughter of the owner of the Maison Fournaise, with her yellow boater;
the beige- yellow boater highlighted with an orange band – on the man with the sharply angled head in the top right of the painting;
the yellow boater of the painter Gustave Caillebotte sitting in the front right plane
opposite the young lady (Renoir’s fiancée) with a dog and her soft boater of cream-yellow straw with orange flowers.
The orange flowers on the soft boater of Renoir’s fiancée passes in a straight line to the orange hatband of the angled-faced man in the right-hand corner, touching, in passing, the orange of another flower on another boater:
this of a woman, seated and drinking in the middle distance of this grouping of people.
The anchoring yellows have you moving about in the quadrangle they enclose, observing the participants in the sunlight.
Finally, you raise your eyes to the awning.
The soft-orange-and-grey summer awning, its triangular flags shifting a little in the breeze, unite the oranges – smudges, stripes, bottle corks, lips – of this painting.
But they detain you just for a moment before you return to another round of the sun yellows and the lively guests in the painting.
The Luncheon of the Boating Party (Le Déjeuner des Canotiers), 1880-81, oil on canvas.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1844-1919, French. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
A brilliant painting. Life itself.
News reports of long, long lines in France waiting to view this painting when The Phillips returned it to France on exhibit a few years ago were not surprising.
Nor reports of some people in tears. They must have recalled, if not this very painting, an astonishing talent, one of several; and a period in France of peace.
The Studio on the Rue La Condamine, oil on canvas, 1865.
Frédéric Bazille, 1841-1870. Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France on loan to the National Gallery, Washington, DC in the winter/spring, 2017
The painter Frédéric Bazille shared this studio with Renoir after moving to the Batignolles district of Paris in 1868. Paintings of Monet and Renoir are on the walls.
From the extreme left: Renoir (thought to be), Monet, the critic Zacharie Astruc, Manet wearing a hat. Bazille (painted by Manet) is seen looking at the easel. At the piano is a close friend of Bazille’s, Edmond Maître.
This was a period of peace.
The Franco-Prussian war which had cost France portions of Alsace and Lorraine had ended 10 years before. The Third Republic, which was to last 70 years, was in its early, successful institutionalization. There was quiet now. There was no sign of the Great War to come or the disturbances and sadness which accompanied it and for years thereafter.
Halcyon days.
Thanks a lot for all those details about Renoir’s wonderful painting🎨
Thank you, Luisa, for your kind comment! Sarah
My pleasure, dear Sarah ❣️🌹❣️
Times past, yes; but inwardly able to lighten our inward way even today. Thank you for the reminder.