Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Date: 1880 - 1881
Style: Impressionism
Period: Rejection of Impressionism
Genre: genre painting
Material: oil, canvas
Location: The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, US
Dimensions: 172.7 x 129.5 cm
Shortly after confirming his purchase of The Luncheon of the Boating Party, Duncan Phillips wrote an enthusiastic letter from Paris informing his treasurer of the acquisition: “The Phillips Memorial Gallery will be the possessor of one of the world’s greatest paintings … it does more good in awakening interest and support for (the Phillips Memorial Gallery) than all the rest of our collection put together.
This picture creates a sensation wherever it goes.” In an affirmation of Phillips’s foresight, these declarations have proven true. The Luncheon of the Boating Party is, without question, among the most-visited, commented on, and memorable paintings in The Phillips Collection. Most of the sitters, all friends of the artist, have been identified.
In the right foreground, Angèle, one of Renoir’s frequent models, turns her head to Maggiolo, a journalist standing by. The painter Gustave Caillebotte sits backward in his chair and gazes at Aline Charigot, Renoir’s future wife, who coos at her terrier, while the burly Alphonse Fournaise Jr., son of the restaurant owner, leans against the balcony railing observing the scene.
In the center, Baron Raoul Barbier, a former cavalry officer, sits with his back to the viewer, speaking to the woman leaning on her elbows on the railing, believed to be Alphonsine Fournaise, the owner’s daughter.
Across the table from Barbier is the actress Ellen Andrée, drinking from a glass. Behind her, the impresario Charles Ephrussi, a banker and editor of the Gazette des beaux-arts, converses with Jules Laforgue, a poet, critic, and Ephrussi’s personal secretary. In the upper right corner, Eugène Pierre Lestringuez, an official from the Ministry of the Interior, laughs with Jeanne Samary, a famous actress from the Comédie Française, while the artist Paul Lhote, a close friend of Renoir’s, leans his head in.
Renoir immortalized his friends to such an extent that the picture “is not anecdotal, but monumental.” Marjorie Phillips was inspired to write: “In the light of time, it does not matter much who the figures are. They are all men, all people.” The masterpiece is a rather compactly composed work, which brings together in one image the time-honored compositional traditions of figure painting, still life, and landscape.
Hailed as “one of the most famous French paintings of modern times” when it was first exhibited, The Luncheon of the Boating Party was flanked by Alfred Sisley’s Snow at Louveciennes and Banks of the Seine in the Phillips Memorial Gallery in December 1923.
At the time, Phillips had intentions of forming a unit of Renoir’s works; however, when the painting came to serve its purpose as a magnet drawing to the museum “pilgrims to do homage to the civilized world,” Phillips realized that The Luncheon of the Boating Party was the only grand work by the artist he would need.
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