Assembled across a summer, sitting by sitting

The picture Renoir set out to paint was, by his standards, enormous. The canvas measures roughly 4 ft 3 in by 5 ft 9 in(a little under four and a half feet tall, a little under six feet wide) — among the largest things he ever painted. That matters, because a canvas that size is not something you carry up to the balcony, set on an easel, and paint while your friends nibble grapes and the light slides across the table. Not really. The romantic version of this picture — fourteen friends sitting still on a balcony while Renoir captured them in one glorious summer afternoon — is, mostly, a romantic version. The real story is more interesting and a lot more work.

What happened was closer to this. Renoir installed himself at the Maison Fournaise across the summer and autumn of 1880 and into 1881 — months, not an afternoon. He set up his big canvas, probably indoors, on the balcony when the weather allowed. He blocked out the composition: where the awning would go, where the table would go, where the railings and the river behind would go, and roughly where each cluster of figures would sit. Then he started asking his friends to come out and pose for him. One at a time, or in small groups. Aline Charigot — his then-girlfriend, twenty-one, a seamstress, from the country town of Essoyes — came out and sat at the lower-left corner with a small dog she brought along. Caillebotte, the wealthy painter-sailor whose boat club this island actually was, came out and posed at the lower right, sitting backwards on a chair to chat with the table. Ellen Andrée, the actress — yes, the same Ellen Andrée who had sat for Degas’s L’Absinthe a few years earlier — came out to the center with a glass in her hand. The Fournaise children, Alphonse Jr. and Alphonsine, leaned on their own family’s railing for him. Charles Ephrussi — a banker, a critic, and editor of the Gazette des beaux-arts(the leading French art magazine of the day; one of the better-informed art writers in Paris and a serious patron) — came out in a top hat for the back of the picture. Each one sat for Renoir, sometimes more than once. He painted each of them in their place. He worked the table, the awning, the railings, the wine bottles, the still life of grapes and glasses, across many sessions. Then, by spring 1881, he had it.

So: not a single posed lunch, but an assembled lunch. Fourteen people who certainly all knew this balcony, certainly all knew each other, certainly had all eaten meals exactly like this one together — but who, on the canvas you can stand in front of in Washington today, were never all there at the same moment in this configuration. The picture is a composite of real, lived afternoons. Which is honest about how big group paintings actually get made, and which takes nothing away from the picture — what it does is shift it from “documentary” to “monument.” Renoir was not catching a single luncheon. He was building a monument to the kind of luncheon he and his friends had been having on this balcony every Sunday for years.

A few things on the practical question of how. The colors he was working in were, by 1880, brand-new in painters’ hands. The chemical industry through the nineteenth century had been busy inventing — and then squeezing into portable metal tubes — pigments that simply had not existed for earlier painters: bright cobalt blue, intense vermilion (a hot scarlet-orange-red), chrome yellow, the cool synthetic ultramarines. The collapsible tin tube of pre-mixed oil paint, invented in the 1840s, meant painters could carry a full palette outdoors and work on the spot without grinding pigments in the studio first. Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party is one of the great showcases of what those tubes made possible: a Sunday balcony lit by high-summer sun through a striped awning, painted in the full chromatic register — cobalts in the river behind, vermilions in the awning stripes and Aline’s hat, pale pinks in the women’s dresses, deep saturated reds in the wine bottles on the table, warm flesh-tones that for Renoir always tipped toward peach. The picture is Renoir-warm— that signature peach-and-pink-and-cream palette that lights up his portraits — pushed to the scale of a salon piece.

He paid serious attention to the still life on the table, too — wine bottles, drained glasses, half-eaten fruit, white napkins, a pile of grapes. Renoir could paint a glass of wine the way other painters paint cathedrals: he made every transparent, half-empty bottle on that table a small jewel, the light passing through dark red into the white tablecloth below. The food and wine on the table are the painting’s quiet announcement that this is what these people have just been doing. The lunch is over. They are at the lingering, post-meal, talking-and-laughing stage. The dishes haven’t been cleared because nobody wants to leave. That whole social moment — the long, slow, end-of-meal hour on a Sunday in summer — is what the picture is fundamentally about. The fourteen people are just the cast for it.

By the time he was finished in early 1881, he had something nobody had quite painted before: not a battle, not a feast of antiquity, not a portrait, but a modern, middle-class Sunday lunch, on the scale of a history painting, with the full chromatic intensity of new tube paints, populated by his actual friends. The man at the easel and the people at the table were the same circle. The picture and the world it depicted were continuous. The painting was, in a sense, the boating party — only slowed down and made permanent.