Luncheon of the Boating Party

by Susan Vreeland

  “The obituary said he cast a great influence on some poets outside France—Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and an Irishman named Yeats,” I said.

  “That’s a kind of immortality.”

  He was silent a few moments, and then said, “Angèle came to see me once with a husband. She had become proper. ‘He knows I posed for you,’ she said, and then she added in a whisper, ‘but he doesn’t know that I used to say merde.’” He chuckled in a tender, bemused way. “Scratch a bohemian and you find a person yearning to be a bourgeois. There was hardly a hint of that raw, earthy vitality. A shame. In a way, she had sold herself.”

  In a moment his eyes turned serious.

  “Jeanne acted for ten years after that summer,” he said, as though the painting marked a division in his life, “and became an officer of the Académie Française. She had finally convinced Guy de Maupassant to let the Comédie-Française produce his story ‘Yvette’ for her to play the lead role, but she died three days after he agreed. Typhoid fever. Two thousand people followed her coffin to the cemetery, I among them.”

  “I thought of you when I read the obituary,” I said.

  He looked at me a long time, blinking. His mouth opened, closed, and then he asked, softly, “Did you ever have a lover?”

  I was pleased that he wanted to know.

  “Yes. A painter.”

  Auguste’s eyes opened wider and out of his mouth came a rising “Oh-h.” I took it to mean approval.

  “Maurice Réalier-Dumas. He painted me sitting at a table by the riverbank under a maple tree, and created frescoes of the four ages of man on the Maison. In the dining room, his comical murals of storybook characters in a jungle remind me that it was a happy time, those ten years. He was fourteen years younger than I was. His pious parents forced him to give me up as inappropriately old, but the longing to be precious to someone was satisfied and lost its hold on me. I have your kiss to thank for that. It freed me from the claims of the past.”

  He patted me on the arm with his curled fist.

  “Loving your neighbor as yourself is a complicated thing,” I said. “Saving the life of an enemy was easier than decorating a hat and giving it to a rival. What made that difficult was the belief that there wasn’t enough love to go around. But I found there is.”

  He nodded. “There always is.”

  I still live on the island in the great river that flows through the bosom of France. I kept the Maison open for twenty-five years after the painting. Thousands of reenactments of the pleasure Auguste recorded took place there. It had been a part of the healing of France once. I wish it could be again, after this generation’s calamity.

  Two weeks ago, I heard a motorcar stop alongside the Maison. I went out to the side balcony. The driver opened the rear door, where Auguste sat alone. It took all my self-possession not to leap down the stairs to smother him in an embrace. He would have to make the first move, if only a tiny gesture or a word.

  I could say there was yearning in his eyes, but I suspect I was only seeing my own, mirrored in his face. Whenever I’ve tried to enter imaginatively into another person’s life, Auguste’s or Aline’s, for example, I found connections that lifted me above mere personal perspectives to a higher contemplation. In that instant, as he sat in the motorcar, I saw his life and his life’s work as one great, open-armed cry of love.

  Without a word, we only looked. We were linked in a way too pure for words.

  Let go. Let him go, I told myself. Eventually he murmured to the driver to close the door.

  I’ve come to think that if doing something simple or silly can give a person pleasure, then, by God, do it. So, with the article still in my hand, I came out this evening in the early twilight, sat in the swing on the bank of the Seine, backed up as far as I could, and swung forward, sailing out over the timeless eddies and the ducks in pairs, so I could feel that moment of weightlessness, that suspension of all earthly ties. I pray that’s what Auguste is feeling now, and Gustave, and Louis, and Alexander, and Aline too, all of them enjoying that sweet bodiless flight above a river bathed in winter light. A cork may swirl in an eddy or rest in a tangle of reeds, but only for a time. It passes on to other, unknown pleasures.

  I’m remembering now our last conversation in the South of France. “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 first 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 divine. Just like clouds.”

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

  Author’s Note

  Renoir finished 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 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 fiction 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 patronized 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.

  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.

  Limitations of space prevent me from mentioning the many other published reference sources. For a complete bibliography of works consulted, 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 Thomas Cooper Library of the University of South Carolina and Dyanne Hoffman, formerly of the University of California San Diego Libraries, were my magical links to books and materials I could not have accessed 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 Desplat, 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 Harpster, 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.

  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 Franciliennes, n.d.), 74.