The hit of the seventh show

The picture was finished in early 1881, and the obvious next question was where it would be seen. The answer turned out to be the 7th Impressionist Exhibition, in Paris, in March 1882 — the seventh of the eight group shows the Impressionists organized between 1874 and 1886, the cooperative shows they put on themselves after years of being rejected from the official Salon (the state-sponsored annual exhibition that had been the only respectable way for a painter to be seen in Paris before this whole crowd decided to go around it).

By 1882 the Impressionists were not new news anymore. They had been showing together for eight years. The mockery of the early shows — the wallpaper-is-more-finished sneer that had landed on Monet’s Impression, Sunrise at the 1874 debut, and given the movement its name — had largely faded. Critics were taking the group seriously, some warmly, some grudgingly. But internally the cooperative was a mess: the painters were quarreling about who could show with them, what counted as Impressionism, whether realists like Degas should be allowed to drag in their friends, whether you could show at the official Salon and the group show, and so on. The 7th show was put on largely under the practical direction of Paul Durand-Ruel(1831–1922) — the great Parisian dealer who had been buying the Impressionists’ work, often the only person buying it, for over a decade. He was the one who hung the show, paid for the venue, and managed the catalogue. Without Durand-Ruel there would not really have been a 7th exhibition; without Durand-Ruel there is a fair case the Impressionists would not have survived as a group at all.

Renoir hung Luncheon of the Boating Party as the centerpiece of his contribution. And the reception, by the standards of a movement that had been a punching bag for years, was something close to a triumph. Three of the show’s critics named it the best work in the exhibition. The picture’s particular trick was that it was unmistakably Impressionist — loose handling, full color, modern subject, painted in front of the world — but it also had the scale and the ambitionof a Salon machine, the kind of multi-figure group composition the official jury rewarded. It looked like a Renoir, and it also looked like a serious public statement. That combination disarmed a lot of the standard objections. It was hard to say “these people only do sketches” in front of a 4-by-6-foot picture with fourteen carefully observed sitters and a full still life in the foreground.

There was also a quieter shift inside the picture that critics noticed and that historians later argued about: the figures in Luncheon are more solidly modeled, more carefully drawn, more constructed than in Renoir’s pure plein-air work of the 1870s. The faces have weight; the bodies have anatomy; the composition is built like a Veronese, not improvised like a sketch. By 1882 Renoir was already, quietly, drifting away from the looser end of Impressionism — he would soon make a trip to Italy and come back even more committed to drawing, to the figure, to the Renaissance tradition. Luncheon of the Boating Party is a picture of an Impressionist on the verge of leaving Impressionism behind, painting the kind of figure-and-banquet picture his Louvre heroes would have recognized, in his own present-tense world. Some critics in 1882 saw that already and praised it as evidence Renoir was maturing; others, more Impressionist-loyal, saw it as a partial retreat. Both reads have something to them. The picture sits exactly on the hinge.

But what mattered commercially, in March 1882, had already happened a year earlier — and quietly. Durand-Ruel had bought the picture from Renoir directly in February 1881, before it even went on display, for 6,000 francs. The dealer paid the painter, took the picture into his stock, and then put it in the show. So the buzz around Luncheon at the 7th exhibition was buzz around a picture that was already off the market, sitting in Durand-Ruel’s inventory. 6,000 francs in 1881 was a serious sum — about a year’s salary for a comfortable Paris professional — and it was the price at which the picture entered the world as a commodity. Durand-Ruel would keep it in his stock from that moment, through ups and downs, near-sales, financial panics, exhibitions in Paris and New York — for the next forty-two years.

That’s worth pausing on. Durand-Ruel held Luncheon of the Boating Partylonger than most museum directors have careers. He loved the picture personally. He hung it in his own gallery, in his own home for periods, took it to America when he was trying to sell the Impressionists to New York collectors, brought it back when they didn’t buy. Several times he came close to selling it and didn’t, either because the offer wasn’t enough or because he couldn’t bear to part with it. The painter went home with his 6,000 francs in 1881; the picture itself stayed on Durand-Ruel’s walls for four decades. Until a determined American came knocking.