The Maison Fournaise on the Seine

Picture a long, thin island in the Seine, ten miles west of central Paris, a half-hour out by train. On its bank stands a wooden balcony, painted cheerfully, with a striped red-and-white awning running overhead. Below the balcony, the river. Tied along the bank, rowing boats — slim, varnished, the kind two friends take out on a Sunday for the afternoon. Behind the balcony, a restaurant. And on a hot Sunday in the summer of 1880, the restaurant is full of painters, models, journalists, civil servants, an Italian reporter, a banker who collects art, an actress, a baron in a bowler hat, and at one table, a girl from the country with a small dog on her lap. The painter has been a regular here for years. He is about to ask all of them to sit still for him, one at a time, on this same balcony, across the rest of this summer and into the next, until he has put every single one of them into one picture.

The painter is Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), and the place is the Maison Fournaise — the “Fournaise House,” named for the family that ran it. The Maison Fournaise wasn’t a café (somewhere to drink coffee at a small table) and it wasn’t a tavern (somewhere to drink wine and not much else). It was something more specific and more useful: a restaurant with a boat-rental business attached. The owner, Alphonse Fournaise Sr., fed lunch to his customers upstairs and rented them rowing skiffs from the bank below. You came out from Paris, you had a long lunch, you rowed for an hour or two, you came back and had another drink, you got the train home before dark. That was the whole point of the place.

The island it sat on was — and still is — called the Île de Chatou (pronounced “EEL duh shah-TOO”; île is just French for “island”). Today it has a nicer marketing name, the Île des Impressionnistes — “Island of the Impressionists” — for reasons that will become obvious. It sits in the Seine downstream of Paris, between the suburbs of Chatou and Rueil-Malmaison, near Bougival. In 1837 the French had laid the Paris–Saint-Germain railway through Chatou, with a station a short walk from the river. By the 1860s and 70s this had transformed the place: from a quiet riverside village into something brand-new, something cities had never really had before. A weekend escape. A day-trip suburb. The train from Paris’s busiest western station, the Gare Saint-Lazare, dropped you on the platform inside half an hour, and you walked to the river, and the river was full of small boats and people who looked like you, dressed in their slightly-better Sunday clothes, here to spend a day not being at work.

This was a genuinely new thing. The middle classes of Paris, swelling through the 1870s on the back of railways and factories and the great rebuilding of the city by Baron Haussmann (the prefect who tore the medieval city down and rebuilt it with the wide boulevards we still walk today), suddenly had money, free time, and a way to get out of town. They invented the weekend as we know it — or close enough — and they spent it on the river. Canotage, the French called it (roughly “boating”; canot is a small rowing boat, and canotage is the whole subculture of rowing, picnics, and river-loafing built around it). The clothes were specific: men in straw boaters (a hard, flat-brimmed straw hat with a black ribbon, originally worn by boat crews — hence the name), sleeveless white singlets so you could row without overheating, dark trousers. Women in light summer dresses and straw hats. The whole canotageset had its own slang, its own pubs, its own scandalous reputation — these were not duels-and-balls aristocrats, this was a new mongrel class of artists, clerks, model-girlfriends, journalists, and minor officials, mixing across lines their parents would never have crossed.

Renoir, by the summer of 1880, had been part of this world for years. He was thirty-nine. He had already painted the dance hall in Montmartre (Bal du moulin de la Galette, 1876, an enormous outdoor party scene with friends as sitters) and a brilliant earlier riverside picture, La Grenouillère(“the Frog Pond,” 1869), painted on this same stretch of the Seine alongside Monet. He had been showing with the Impressionists since their first exhibition in 1874. He was friends with the Fournaise family personally — not paying them as models, but eating their food, drinking their wine, and asking favors of them as he went. And he had an ambition.

The ambition was a big one. Renoir had been at the Louvre staring at sixteenth-century Italian banquet pictures — particularly Paolo Veronese’s vast, packed, color-drenched Wedding at Cana (1563) and Feast in the House of Levi (1573). Veronese (the 16th-century Venetian painter of vast crowded banquet scenes, full of dozens of figures around a long table under a parted curtain or canopy, painted at refectory scale for the dining halls of Venetian monasteries) was Renoir’s model. Renoir wanted to do what Veronese did — a friezelike crowd of figures around a table, the full chromatic register, the whole canvas thick with life — but for hisworld. Not a biblical feast in sixteenth-century Venice. A modern lunch on a balcony over the Seine, in the present tense, with his actual friends. The striped awning would stand in for Veronese’s curtain. The remains of the meal on the table would stand in for Veronese’s roast birds. The boating club would stand in for the Venetian household. The wedding at Cana, recast on the Île de Chatou, in 1880.

He just needed his cast. And the cast, conveniently, was already in the room.