Masterpiece of Light
Inviting myself along on Renoir’s boating party
For most of my decade or so living in Washington, DC, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party,” was my neighbor.
People often are surprised this painting lives in Washington. They expect that it is in Paris somewhere, maybe alongside Manet in the Musee d’Orsay. But in fact it is the centerpiece of the Phillips Collection, quietly nestled on 21st Street just off Embassy Row.
The Phillips was my favorite art museum before I even moved to DC. I have always had an affinity for the small museums that grew from the private collections of individual art patrons: the Phillips, the Frick, the Barnes in Philadelphia. I like the cohesion of a collector’s eye.
Duncan and Marjorie Phillips and Albert Barnes were contemporaries, often competing in the market for the same paintings. Both were inspired by the 1913 Armory Show in New York, a scandalous show of the modern art coming out of Paris.
Renoir was among the artists in that show. Most who saw the Armory Show were horrified, but it opened the eyes of the Phillipses and Barnes. And what was scandal then is canon today.
I had the quirky pleasure of visiting the Barnes Collection several times in its original location out the Philly Main Line. Barnes collected Renoirs like peanuts, some 200 of them. They include some fine pieces, but to my eye the majority of them are Renoir at his garish worst.
The story goes that one day Barnes and Duncan Phillips were standing before the “Luncheon of the Boating Party,” and Barnes chided: “That’s the only Renoir you have, isn’t it?”
Phillips replied: “It’s the only one I need.”
“Luncheon of the Boating Party” is Renoir at his finest. It is 5'8" wide by 4'3" tall, and it occupies a place of honor in a small gallery near the start of the Phillips’ permanent collection on the second floor.
When I lived in DC, I had a membership at the Phillips, of course. One of my favorite things to do on a hot and muggy DC day was to wander over to the Phillips, sit on the bench in the middle of that gallery, and gaze at the painting of friends as they enjoyed their outing in the French countryside. This group of artists and other Parisian creatives soon became my friends, too.
As I sat in the gallery, museum visitors would wander in and gasp, sigh or whisper, “Here it is.” I noticed early on that parties of two or three gallery-goers would almost immediately start making up stories about what was going on in the painting: What’s up with that dog, why is the woman in at the right rear holding her ears, where are the boats? Their concern was not historical fact so much as satisfying an irresistible urge to fill in the gaps with story.
Renoir painted “The Luncheon of the Boating Party” in 1880-81, just about smack in the middle of the Impressionist era. The Impressionists were all about light, and with Renoir’s painting filling my field of vision, I would bask in it.
The Impressionists were so obsessed with light simply because they were outdoors. They had taken artmaking out of the studio and into the countryside. Renoir’s masterwork thus became a lesson for me in how technology and art intersect, because the Impressionists’ move outdoors was the direct result of two 19th century technologies:
1 The invention in 1841 of the paint tube, which made oil paints easily transportable and the available color palette much more amenable to spontaneous choice. Renoir himself said, “Without tubes of paint, there would have been no Impressionism.”
2 The completion at mid-century of the French railway system with Paris at its hub, allowing easy, affordable day travel from the city into the countryside.
A popular destination for the day-trippers was out along the Seine. One fine day, Renoir organized his circle of friends to travel out with him to Maison Fournaise, a popular restaurant at Chatou.
The Impressionists knew this ground well. Nearby is the swimming hole at La Grenouillère, where Monet and Renoir painted side by side and pretty much launched the plein air craze in 1869. Not far away is Argenteuil, where Monet, Manet and Caillebotte depicted sailboats on the Seine.
At Chatou, the recreation was boating, and thus Renoir’s this convivial group was dubbed the boating party.
In my hours eavesdropping at the Phillips, the gallery-goers would move from their made up stories to discussions about who the people depicted actually were. The Phillips docents helpfully provided an identifying schematic on a card they left on the bench where I always sat. Sometimes I would offer the card to the wondering gallery-goers, and sometimes I’d hide it.
To me, the figures had taken on their own identities, only loosely coupled with their historical selves. But for the historically minded, the man in the straw hat and white sleeveless boating shirt at the left is Alphonse Fournaise Jr., in charge of the boating rentals at Maison Fournaise, and that’s his sister Louise-Alphonsine leaning on the rail to his right. The woman holding up the dog is Aline Charigot, a seamstress whom Renoir later wed. On the far right is Gustav Caillebotte, art patron, champion of the Impressionists, a painter himself, and an avid boater.
The rest of the characters in the painting are part of the Parisian art crowd back then, some definitively identified, others speculatively so.
Alone with “Luncheon of the Boating Party,” one of the first things I noticed is the virtuosity of Renoir’s composition. The characters in the painting form small groups, and each of the groupings has a center of attention that will keep your eye lingering there. But each also has a character looking out of the grouping, inviting your eye to move onward.
I came to believe this was the engine driving the impromptu storytelling. Oh look at the dog, hmm, Caillebotte’s looking at Fournaise, and Fournaise is looking over at that woman holding her ears. Is that lecherous dude next to her telling a dirty joke?
While our eyes eavesdrop on one grouping or another, Renoir deftly uses color to hold his composition together. I overheard a gallery talk as it passed through one day, and it opened my eyes to this deeper look at the Renoir’s artistry.
See that orange color in the flower on Aline’s hat? It’s also in the stripe on the awning overhead. And it’s on the piping of Louise-Alphonsine’s blouse. It’s on the hatband and the shirt of the lecherous joke-teller at the upper right. The more you look, the more places you see it.
And speaking of that table: The figures in the painting so rivet the attention that it was months before I realized that “Luncheon of the Boating Party” was not simply a group portrait. That table setting could stand on its own as a still life to make the old masters proud. The wine bottles, the glasses, the grapes, the rumpled tablecloth, I can almost see Cezanne struggling to recapture that tablecloth decades later.
That tablecloth, in fact, lights the whole composition. Throughout the painting, the light is soft and indirect. It’s source is outside to the left and above the awning. The scene would be dim but for that tablecloth.
Notice how the tablecloth reflects the outside light up through the glassware and onto the clothing and faces of the people surrounding the table. The light from that tablecloth brings Renoir’s masterpiece alive.
That light illuminates the stories of the gallery-goers that they carry it with them beyond the gallery. I was lucky enough to imbibe that intoxicating light so often that it lives in my memory, renewed every time I visit DC.