Luncheon of the Boating Party

Fourteen friends at the end of a summer lunch on a Seine balcony — the warmest large picture Impressionism ever painted, assembled across a whole season.

1. 1
   The girl with the dog

   Lower-left, at the table

   A young woman in a dark hat — Aline Charigot, twenty-one years old, Renoir’s then-girlfriend — leans down toward a small fluffy dog she is holding up at her chin and kissing on the nose. The dog (a Brussels griffon / affenpinscher type) is the only animal in the picture, and it is getting the picture’s most undivided affection. She wouldn’t marry Renoir for another nine years; she’s a girlfriend here, not a fiancée.
2. 2
   The patron in the corner

   Lower-right, seated at the table

   A muscular man in a white sleeveless singlet and a straw boater hat, straddling a chair backwards with his arms folded over the back, gazes across the picture toward Aline. This is Gustave Caillebotte — a serious painter himself, a competitive sailor, and the wealthy friend who bailed out his fellow Impressionists by buying their work when nobody else would. Renoir putting him in the foreground in boating dress, posed informally on a turned-around chair, is a quiet thank-you.
3. 3
   The actress in the centre

   Centre of the picture, at the table

   A woman in a pale dress holds a tall glass up to her face — sometimes read as raised to her ear, sometimes as raised in a toast. This is Ellen Andrée, an actress who sat for half the Impressionist circle through the 1870s and 80s. If she looks familiar, that’s because she’s the same model who appears in Degas’s L’Absinthe (1875–76); the picture’s Ellen Andrée and this one’s are the same woman on either side of the same circle of friends.
4. 4
   The banker-critic at the back

   Right side, rear of the picture

   Look for the one top hat in the painting — the formal black silk cylinder a man wore when dressing up — at the right rear. That’s Charles Ephrussi, a banker, an art critic, and the editor of the leading French art magazine of the day, the Gazette des beaux-arts. He’s overdressed for a lunch on a balcony, and that’s the point: he’s a city gentleman who has come out to slum it on the river with the painters.
5. 5
   Veronese’s curtain

   Across the top of the picture

   The whole top of the canvas is filled by a red-and-white striped awning — the cloth canopy stretched over the balcony to shade the table from the high summer sun. It does a lot of work. It casts dappled, slightly tinted light over everybody underneath. It locks the group into a single shared space. And it is Renoir’s deliberate nod to the parted curtains overhead in Paolo Veronese’s huge sixteenth-century banquet paintings — the Renaissance machinery dragged into a modern Sunday lunch on the Seine.
6. 6
   The lunch is over, nobody’s leaving

   Foreground, along the table

   Look along the white tablecloth at the bottom: half-empty wine bottles, drained glasses, grapes spilled across a napkin, the remains of fruit. Renoir paints every transparent bottle as a small jewel — the light passing through the dark red into the white cloth below. The whole still life is the picture’s quiet announcement that lunch is already finished; the cast is in the lingering, end-of-meal, talking-and-laughing stage. The dishes haven’t been cleared because nobody wants to leave.
7. 7
   The actual reason everyone is here

   Background, between the figures, just above the railings

   Look through the gaps between the people at the back, just above the painted railings: faint shapes of slim rowing skiffs on the river. Two or three are suggested, no more. They’re easy to miss, and that’s almost the joke — those boats are the reason for the Maison Fournaise, for the balcony, for the train out from Paris, for the canotage subculture, and for all fourteen of these people being on this balcony at all.