Duncan Phillips’s twelve-year pursuit

The American was Duncan Phillips (1886–1966), and he is the reason Luncheon of the Boating Party is now in Washington, D.C., rather than Paris.

Phillips was the heir to a steel-and-glass-industry fortune in Pittsburgh, born into serious old American money. He could have done what rich Americans of his generation usually did, which was buy old-master European pictures certified by the same dealers their parents had used and hang them in a marble house. He did something different. He became, in the 1910s, one of the very first American collectors to take seriously the modern French painting his peers were still mostly suspicious of — the Impressionists, the post-Impressionists, the early modernists. And after his father and his brother both died in 1917 and 1918 within a year of each other, he and his mother decided to convert their grief into a memorial: a private art museum, in their Washington family home, dedicated to modern painting. They opened it in 1921 as the Phillips Memorial Gallery (today The Phillips Collection— a private collection-museum, founded by Duncan Phillips, not a city museum and not run by the federal government; it is one of the very first museums of modern art in the United States, predating MoMA in New York by eight years).

Phillips had a particular eye for centerpieces. He believed every great collection needed an anchor — one painting at the heart of it that the rest of the collection could be read against. He wanted a Renoir for his anchor. He wanted, specifically, Luncheon of the Boating Party. He had probably seen it in Durand-Ruel’s New York gallery — Durand-Ruel had been quietly trying to interest Americans in his Renoirs since the 1880s — and from 1911 onward, by his own later account, he chased it. He pursued the picture for twelve years. Durand-Ruel would not let it go cheaply, partly because by the 1920s its value was finally what he had always thought it was, and partly because he didn’t really want to sell it at all.

The deal closed in 1923. Phillips paid Durand-Ruel $125,000 for Luncheon of the Boating Party— a vast sum at the time, far more than he had paid for any other picture in his collection, and one of the largest sums anyone had yet paid for a modern French painting. (For comparison, you could buy a substantial American house in 1923 for a few thousand dollars; $125,000 was the price of a country estate.) The arc, end to end, is worth looking at as numbers: 6,000 francs from Durand-Ruel to Renoir in 1881; $125,000 from Phillips to Durand-Ruel forty-two years later. Whatever the exchange rate did over those four decades (the franc weakened, the dollar strengthened, the First World War scrambled both), the painting’s price had multiplied many times over — and Durand-Ruel was, finally, vindicated. The painting traveled across the Atlantic and into the Phillips’s Washington gallery, where it has been ever since. Durand-Ruel let it go after forty-two years. Phillips, who had been chasing it for twelve, had his anchor.

And here is the thing — Phillips was right about the centerpiece. Luncheon of the Boating Partyis what the Phillips Collection is now built around. The museum has acquired a great many other things in the century since, has expanded its galleries, has built a serious modern and contemporary program — but the painting at the center of the place, the one most visitors walk in to see, is still Renoir’s Sunday lunch on the balcony. Phillips’s gamble that one picture could anchor an entire institution turned out to be exactly correct.

A few footnotes from the afterlife.

Aline Charigot, the girl with the dog in the lower-left corner, did eventually marry Pierre-Auguste Renoir — but not in 1881, and not in 1882. They married in 1890, nine years after the painting was finished. They had three sons. The middle son, Jean Renoir, born 1894, would grow up to become one of the great filmmakers of the twentieth century (La Grande Illusion, The Rules of the Game) and would write a tender memoir of his father in old age. The “Aline and Renoir married right after the painting” version of the story is one of those compressions that art-history captions love and that simply isn’t true. Nine years is nine years.

The Maison Fournaise, the restaurant on the Île de Chatou where all of this happened, still exists. Through the twentieth century the building fell into serious disrepair; by the 1970s it was in poor condition. It was restored in the 1980s, and the museum on the site reopened in 1990. Today it operates as both a working restaurant and a small museum dedicated to the painters who came there. You can have lunch on the same balcony Renoir painted from. The awning is gone, the river is cleaner, the boats are different, but the structure is there. The island is now officially the Île des Impressionnistes, and the city of Chatou has, sensibly, made the painters its tourist brand.

Charles Ephrussi, the banker-critic in the top hat at the back of the picture, would die in 1905. His family’s banking dynasty would be destroyed during the Second World War, when the Nazis seized their Paris and Vienna collections; one branch of the family would survive and produce the writer who, a century later, would tell that story in The Hare with Amber Eyes. Caillebotte would die in 1894 at forty-five, bequeathing his vast collection of Impressionist paintings (the one he’d been quietly building by bailing his friends out of debt for two decades) to the French state — the core of what is now the Impressionist holdings of the Musée d’Orsay. Ellen Andrée would keep acting into the early twentieth century. Aline would die in 1915, four years before Renoir. Renoir would paint, increasingly crippled by arthritis, with brushes strapped to his hands, until he died in 1919.

The picture outlived them all. Sit with the arc of it. A painter who had been eating lunch on a balcony over the Seine for years decided to put fourteen of his friends into one canvas — assembled across a summer and an autumn, pose by pose, in front of a striped awning that was meant to be Veronese’s curtain. He sold it to his dealer for 6,000 francs in 1881. The dealer kept it for forty-two years. A grieving American heir chased it across the Atlantic for twelve. The painting that was, in its day, a manifesto for a brand-new kind of modern-life painting now hangs as the most-loved object in a small private museum in Washington — the same balcony, the same dog, the same wine bottles, the same actress with her glass, frozen at the long, slow, end-of-meal hour that nobody on that balcony ever wanted to leave.