Luncheon of the Boating Party (62 page)

BOOK: Luncheon of the Boating Party

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“Do you see all the years behind you? Each one?” I had asked.

“Yes. I’ve painted all of them.”

“Then time must be continuous for you.”

“Like a river.” He blinked uncontrollably. “I still love all the models I ever painted, women and men, so they are all alive to me.”

With his frozen fist resting on my arm, he slowly brought his face close to mine. “Honors shower me from every side. The Maison Fournaise painting wins praise wherever Durand-Ruel shows it. Today’s artists pay me compliments. They find my position enviable. But I don’t have a single real friend.”

It seemed too late, too obvious, too trite for me to say,
You have me.

Instead, I reached into my handbag and took out the cork. He couldn’t hold it, so I let it lie in my palm on his lap. “The cork from the fi rst bottle opened on the first painting day. For you.”

His face contorted, and a tear bubbled over the tic beneath his eye.

That communion we had felt at Chatou enfolded us again.

“At least a dozen paintings I did of you and you never let me paint your breasts. That was a sin, you know, not letting me. I was on the verge of tears when you refused.”

I laughed, amused by his pouting.

“I suffered intensely from being deprived of seeing something I knew would be beautiful.”

I shook my head. “When will you get over your obsession with

breasts?”

“Never!” he declared, sensuality brightening his eyes. “They’re di-vine. Just like clouds.”

The incandescence that glowed hotly when he painted the boating party fl ickered back to life. That ought to satisfy me for another forty years.

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Author’s Note

Renoir fi nished and signed
Le déjeuner des canotiers
in 1881, and Paul Durand-Ruel purchased it on February 14, 1881, sold it to a Parisian collector, but reacquired it early in 1882. Contrary to Renoir’s wish, though Renoir did eventually acquiesce, Durand-Ruel showed it in the seventh Impressionist exhibition in March 1882, and later in London, Zurich, and New York. It was never shown at the Salon. Durand-Ruel kept it for the rest of his life.

After his death, Durand-Ruel’s sons sold the painting to Duncan Phillips in 1923 for his Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington, D.C., now known as The Phillips Collection. Exulting over the purchase in a letter, Phillips called it “one of the greatest paintings in the world . . . a masterpiece by Renoir and finer than any Rubens. . . . Its fame is tremendous and people will travel thousands of miles to our house to see it. . . . Such a picture creates a sensation wherever it goes.”1

The identities of the models are true, with the exception of the last face painted, which is still in question, with possibilities being either Guy de Maupassant or Renoir himself.2 An extensive technical examination made by the conservation department at The Phillips Collection reports that the repositioning of the figures and the late addition of the awning were executed as I have narrated them.

For the sake of the narrative, the actual dates of certain events were adjusted by a few months. We can assume that his broken arm was out 1. Eliza E. Rathbone et al.,
Impressionists on the Seine: A Celebration of Renoir’s “Luncheon of the
Boating Party”
(Washington, D.C.: The Phillips Collection, 1996), 231–234.

2. Benoît Noël and Jean Hournon,
La Seine au temps des canotiers
(Paris: Les Presses Francili-ennes, n.d.), 74.

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A u t h o r ’ s N o t e

of the cast when he began the painting. Most but not all sources have reported the date Renoir became acquainted with Aline to have been just prior to his commencement of the painting. The identity of the model for
La balançoire, The Swing,
is reported to be either a different Jeanne than Jeanne Samary, which I thought would be confusing, or Margot Legrand. For the purposes of my narrative, I chose Margot.

For the portrait of Alphonsine painted to pay Renoir’s debt, I chose
Alphonsine Fournaise, fille d’un restaurateur de Chatou,
actually painted in 1879. Its background of river and railroad bridge fit my narrative better than
Portrait of Alphonsine Fournaise,
1880, executed in an interior with a plain background that offered me no narrative link.

Sources disagree as to whether Angèle posed for
Sleeping Girl with
a Cat.
Barbara Ehrlich White in
Renoir, His Life, Art and Letters
and François Daulte in
Renoir: Catalogue raisonné
affirm that she did. It is my fi ction that a study for
Two Little Circus Girls
was sold to the very real clown, Sagot.

Apologies to Monsieur Mullard for my use of Julien Tanguy, a more colorful character, as Renoir’s pigment supplier. Certainly Renoir pa-tronized both shops during his long career. Renoir owned several bicycles and one steam-powered three-wheeled cycle in his adult life; he suffered two falls, the first in January 1880. The second, from a bicycle in Essoyes, was thought to have contributed to his later incapacity. Angèle riding the steam-cycle and its subsequent sale to Alphonse Fournaise were my inventions.

Other than these occasions, I have not departed intentionally from known fact, but have taken the novelist’s license of invention where no facts are known. I take my cue from Renoir: not all of his models were as lovely as he painted them, and we do not feel cheated.

A large portion of Gustave Caillebotte’s collection, along with
Alphonsine Fournaise, fille d’un restaurateur de Chatou,
can be seen at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. After being closed a number of years, La Maison Fournaise is open as a restaurant with its terrace shaded by a striped awning. Part of the building houses Le Musée Fournaise, featuring work by those who painted this stretch of the Seine.

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Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to the authors of two books in particular: Eliza Rathbone, Katherine Rothkopf, Richard Brettell, Elizabeth Steele, and Charles Moffett for
Impressionists on the Seine: A Celebration of Renoir’s

“Luncheon of the Boating Party,”
published by The Phillips Collection; and Jean Renoir for his biographical memoir,
Renoir: My Father,
which gave me the flavor of Renoir’s voice and opinions.

I am indebted to the following biographical works:
Renoir: The Man,
the Painter, and His World
by Lawrence Hanson;
Renoir
by John House, Anne Distel, and Lawrence Gowing;
Renoir et ses amis
by Georges Rivière;
Renoir: An Intimate Record
by Ambroise Vollard; and
Renoir,
His Life, Art and Letters
by Barbara Ehrlich White.

For art-historical information, I especially thank Anne Distel of the Musée d’Orsay, whose scholarship I found in many texts. I also thank Robert Herbert for
Impressionism;
T. J. Clark for
The Painting of Modern Life;
Gabriele Crepaldi for
The Impressionists;
Anne Galloyer for
La
Maison Fournaise: table des canotiers;
Benoît Noël and Jean Hournon for
Les Arts en Seine
and
La Seine au temps des canotiers.

I am indebted to Colette for her colorful sketches of Paris music halls, including the fines charged performers in
The Collected Stories
of Colette;
to Guy de Maupassant for the story Raoul Barbier tells Alphonsine, adapted from “Sur le Seine” or “En Canot”; to Edward King for
My Paris: French Character Sketches,
which gives his eyewitness description of Jardin Mabille and the tribute money that changed hands there; and to Jean Renoir for the item of Angèle “doing a boulevard”

for Renoir. Ross King’s monumental
The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism
was particularly helpful in explaining the workings of the Salon and the events of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune.

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A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

Limitations of space prevent me from mentioning the many other

published reference sources. For a complete bibliography of works con-sulted, please see www.svreeland.com.

Several curators gave me their insights into Renoir and his work. I especially wish to thank Monsieur Jean Habert, conservateur-en-chef des peintures, Musée du Louvre. I am grateful to Madame Anne Galloyer, Conservatrice du Musée Fournaise, Île de Chatou, who answered graciously my many questions. Thanks also to Patrice Marandel and Stephanie Barron of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Nannette Maciejunes, Director of the Columbus Museum of Art; and Stephen Kern, formerly of the San Diego Museum of Art.

Karen Brown, Marna Hostettler, and Jo Cottingham of The Thom-

as Cooper Library of the University of South Carolina and Dyanne Hoffman, formerly of the University of California San Diego Librar-ies, were my magical links to books and materials I could not have ac-cessed otherwise. I wish to thank Françoise Courgabe, Conservatrice de la Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, as well.

For help in preliminary research, thanks go to Gayle Vreeland, and to Caroline Olivier for works in French. For all things pertaining to sailing and regattas, profound thanks to that spirited champion yachtsman, Craig Mueller, as well as to sailing enthusiast Terry Cantor. I am deeply grateful to artist Gerrit Greve for sharing generously his understanding of Renoir as a painter and as a man; to Dennis Sanders for his painter’s perspective while in Paris; and to my lively team of location scouts and photographers in Paris, Betty and Jan-Gerrit van Wijhe.
Merci à
Madame Noëlle Des-plat, Edmond Ballerin, and the members of Association Sequana on Île de Chatou, which restores and builds reproductions of period boats, who made it possible for me to go boating on the Seine, see the spots immortalized by Impressionist painters, and imagine the races and river life.

For their critical reading and insightful commentary, I thank John Baker, Judy Bernstein, Julie Brickman, Mark Doten, Kip Gray, Jerry Hannah, Nan Kaufman, and John and Cheryl Ritter; and for his careful copyediting, Dave Cole. For all things French, and for her precise editorial advice, I am grateful to Madame Babette Mann, my window on French culture and sensibility. Enthusiastic appreciation goes to my energetic, supportive, and keen-eyed editor at Viking, Kendra Harp-ster, who grew along with me on this project. Especially and always, I thrive under the warm and wise counsel and editorial acumen of my agent, Barbara Braun, to whom I am deeply grateful.

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