Fourteen friends, twelve firmly named

Step up to the canvas in Washington and the first thing the picture does is hit you with its warmth. Four feet three inches tall, five feet nine wide — it fills your vision at close range, the size of a small wall, and what comes off it is the heat and laughter of a Sunday afternoon in late summer. Red-and-white awning glowing over your head, sun coming through. Wine bottles on a white tablecloth. Pink dresses, pale singlets, dappled light. Someone is kissing a small dog. Someone is leaning across the railing to flirt. Someone is raising a glass. The whole canvas has the loose, charged buzz of a long lunch that has tipped past its formal end and into the laughing-and-not-leaving stage. That is the picture’s first effect, before any name attaches to any face: it is a record of a particular kind of happiness — middle-class, riverside, late summer, friends, full chromatic blaze — at the scale of a history painting. Then you start to see the structure underneath.

The structure is clean. The painting is arranged in three loose clusters of figures — left, center, right — under that striped awning, with a long table running across the foreground and the railings and the river visible behind. The eye can move group by group. So go group by group.

In the lower-left corner sits a young woman in a dark hat, leaning down toward a small fluffy dog she is holding up and kissing on the nose. This is Aline Charigot (1859–1915) — twenty-one years old here, a seamstress from Essoyes in Champagne, Renoir’s then-girlfriend. She would eventually become his wife, but not for nine more years — they didn’t marry until 1890, and the casual story you’ll sometimes read that they “married right after the painting” is not true. They were a couple, not engaged-and-counting-down. The dog on her lap, by the way, has been variously identified as a Brussels griffon or affenpinscher type — small, scruffy, with a flat face and a serious expression. It is the only animal in the picture and it gets exactly the affection the picture has for Aline herself.

Standing just behind and above Aline, leaning on the balcony railing in a sleeveless white singlet and a straw boater hat, his muscular arms folded on the rail, is Alphonse Fournaise Jr. — the restaurant owner’s son, who ran the boat-hire side of the family business. Across the rail from him, leaning forward on her hands and smiling, is Louise-Alphonsine Fournaise, his sister. They are at home here in the most literal sense; this is their family’s restaurant. The center back of the left cluster, with his back largely to us, in a bowler hat (the round, hard-felt hat that became urban office-uniform in the late nineteenth century), is Baron Raoul Barbier— a former cavalry officer, sometimes described in the older literature as an ex-mayor of colonial Saigon. He is talking to Alphonsine across the railing. That whole left side, then, is the family-and-girlfriend cluster: Aline and her dog at the table, the Fournaise siblings at the rail, and the baron leaning into the conversation.

Roughly in the middle of the picture, holding a glass to her face — sometimes read as raised to her ear, sometimes as raised in a toast — is Ellen Andrée (1857–1925), an actress, friend of the Impressionists, and one of the most-painted faces in 1870s Paris. If you’ve met her before, it’s as the seated woman with the absinthe glass in Degas’s L’Absinthe (1875–76); she sat for half the Impressionist circle through the 1870s and 80s, and here she is again on the other side of the same group of friends, at a wine glass instead of an absinthe glass. Leaning in beside her in a dark suit is Eugène-Pierre Lestringuez, a friend of Renoir’s who worked at the French Ministry of the Interior — a civil servant, not a painter, and one of those people who anchored a bohemian social circle by also having a steady salary. Leaning over her from the other side, in a bowler hat, is Paul Lhote, a writer and journalist friend of Renoir’s. The three of them form the picture’s chatty middle: the actress, the bureaucrat, and the journalist, leaning toward each other over the table, in the kind of conversation everybody has been having on the balcony for the last hour.

In the lower-right corner, seated backwards on a chair — straddling it, his arms folded over the back — in a white sleeveless singlet and a straw boater, gazing across the picture toward Aline and her dog, is Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894). Caillebotte deserves a moment. He was a serious painter himself (his Floor Scrapers of 1875 is one of the great paintings of Parisian labor), a serious competitive sailor (the Île de Chatou was effectively his boat club), and the wealthiest member of the Impressionist circle — the man who bailed his friends out repeatedly by buying their canvases at decent prices when nobody else would. He paid Renoir’s bills more than once. The fact that he sits at the corner of this picture, turned backwards in his chair, dressed as a boater rather than as a society gentleman, is Renoir’s quiet thank-you note. (He shows up in two of these batch-B paintings, by the way — sitting here on the right of Luncheon, and as the buyer behind Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare— and is roughly the patron saint of this whole circle.)

Seated next to Caillebotte, in a black dress and dark hat, is Angèle Legault. The honest line on Angèle is that she is the cluster’s documentation gap. The men around her in this corner each come down to us with a profession and a social role — Caillebotte the painter-patron-sailor, Maggiolo the Italian satirist for Le Triboulet, Ephrussi the banker-editor of the Gazette des beaux-arts. Angèle survives mostly as a name and a face. She was one of the Parisian models who sat for the Impressionists in the late 1870s and early 1880s — Renoir painted her elsewhere too, in single-figure pictures from the same years — and the working life that bracketed those sittings (where she lived, what she did between jobs, who her people were) has not made it down through the same documentary channels that preserved the men’s biographies. Hold that as the truth of her, not as a label: the picture preserves her as carefully as anyone else in this corner; the record around her is what is thin.

Leaning down to Angèle from above is Adrien Maggiolo (sometimes given as Antonio in older sources — both forms turn up), an Italian journalist who wrote for the satirical paper Le Triboulet. Further back, in the rear of the cluster, in a tall top hat (the formal black silk cylinder that was still the gentleman’s hat for a man dressing up in 1880), is Charles Ephrussi — banker, art critic, editor of the Gazette des beaux-arts. (Ephrussi, incidentally, is the great-great-uncle Edmund de Waal writes about in The Hare with Amber Eyes; the Ephrussi banking family ran in these circles.) The man in front of Ephrussi, in a soft hat, looking up at him, is traditionally identified as the poet-critic Jules Laforgue, who was Ephrussi’s secretary — but this identification is contested by some scholars, who read the figure as another of Ephrussi’s circle. And the woman at the right with her hands raised by her ears, as if blocking out the noise, is traditionally identified as the Comédie-Française actress Jeanne Samary— but the placement and even the identification have been debated.

So the honest count is: twelve sitters firmly identified, two contested.That’s an unusual and important thing to say out loud. For a picture this famous, you would think every face had been nailed down for a century. They haven’t quite. Aline, the Fournaises, Barbier, Andrée, Lestringuez, Lhote, Caillebotte, Legault, Maggiolo, and Ephrussi are documented. Laforgue and Samary are likely but not certain — flag them, don’t fix them.

The whole arrangement is held together by a few quiet visual decisions. The striped awning overhead runs across the entire top of the picture, red-and-white, casting the whole scene in dappled, slightly tinted light — this is the Veronese curtain. The railings at the back of the balcony, painted thinly in pale tones, give the picture its horizon line: above the rail, the Seine and a sliver of opposite bank; below it, the lunch. The table runs along the foreground, draped in a white cloth, loaded with the still life of bottles, glasses, fruit, and napkins — the painting’s quiet evidence that this is real food and real wine and a real Sunday, not a tableau set up in a studio. And through the railings, faintly, boats on the river— two or three slim rowing skiffs, just suggested. The boats are the reason all these people are here in the first place; Renoir lets you find them in the background as if they were almost a footnote, but they are the whole reason for the balcony, the restaurant, and the picture.