Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880-1881 Oil on canvas Acquired 1923

About the Painting

For most viewers and admirers of Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, the artist's process appears at first glance to be one of spontaneity and freshness. Consistent with the image of Impressionism as an art of direct observation, this work captures the fleeting effects of light and color. Renoir was so successful in bringing together a large group of figures into a singular, believable image of a charmed moment in time that it requires careful visual examination of the painting's composition to fully understand his artistic achievement.

Detailed observation of the paint surface reveals the high level of skill in the techniques of oil painting that Renoir had developed by this point in his career. The character of his brushwork varies from brightly colored, thickly applied paint in the still life on the table, to the feathered brushstrokes of the landscape in the background. In the figures, Renoir has used firm outlines and subtle gradations of light and dark to clearly define the three-dimensional character of the human body, and the specific details of the facial features.

Click here to see a detailed version of the painting.

What is Impressionism?

In 1874, fifty-five artists held the first independent group show of Impressionist art. Most of them - including Cézanne, Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, Monet, Manet, and his sister-in-law Berthe Morisot ("a bunch of lunatics and a woman," muttered one observer) - had been rejected by the Salon, the annual French state-sponsored exhibition that offered the only real opportunity for artists to display and sell their work. Never mind, they told each other. At the Salon, paintings were stacked three or four high, and crowded too closely together on the walls. At their independent exhibition, mounted in what was formerly a photographer’s studio, the artists could hang their works at eye level with space between them. Although the artists didn’t call themselves "Impressionists" at first, this occasion would be the first of eight such "Impressionist" exhibits over the next twelve years.

An outraged critic, Louis Leroy, coined the label "Impressionist." He looked at Monet’s Impression Sunrise, the artist’s sensory response to a harbor at dawn, painted with sketchy brushstrokes. "Impression!" the journalist snorted. "Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished!" Within a year, the name Impressionism was an accepted term in the art world.

If the name was accepted, the art itself was not. "Try to make Monsieur Pissarro understand that trees are not violet; that the sky is not the color of fresh butter...and that no sensible human being could countenance such aberrations...try to explain to Monsieur Renoir that a woman’s torso is not a mass of decomposing flesh with those purplish-green stains," wrote art critic Albert Wolff after the second Impressionist exhibition. Although some people appreciated the new paintings, many did not. The critics and the public agreed the Impressionists couldn’t draw and their colors were considered vulgar. Their compositions were strange. Their short, slapdash brushstrokes made their paintings practically illegible. Why didn’t these artists take the time to finish their canvases, viewers wondered?

Indeed, Impressionism broke every rule of the French Academy of Fine Arts, the conservative school that had dominated art training and taste since 1648. Impressionist scenes of modern urban and country life were a far cry from the Academic efforts to teach moral lessons through historic, mythological, and Biblical themes. This tradition, drawn from ancient Greek and Roman art, featured idealized images. Symmetrical compositions, hard outlines, and meticulously smooth paint surfaces characterized academic paintings.

Despite the Academy’s power, seeds of artistic and political unrest had been sown long before 1874. The early- and mid-19th century was a time of political instability in France. Between 1830 and 1850, the population of Paris doubled. During the Revolution of 1848, Parisian workers with socialist goals overthrew the monarchy, only to see conservatives seize the reins of government later that year. Fear of further uprisings created widespread distrust among the aristocracy, the poor, and the newly prosperous bourgeoisie or middle class.

At the same time, the far-reaching Industrial Revolution fostered a new faith in the individual and his unlimited potential. Romantic painters such as Eugène Delacroix began to celebrate individuality in terms of painting technique with warm colors and vigorous brushstrokes. Delacroix’s journals would later provide ideas about color theory and painting techniques to the Impressionists. Later in the 19th century, Barbizon School painters Corot, Millet, and Rousseau abandoned classical studio themes to go outside and paint the landscape around them. Realist Gustave Courbet, a mentor to several Impressionists, painted the rural poor just as he saw them. His rough-textured technique displeased the Academy.

The Impressionists, or "Independents," as they preferred to be called, brought together a wide variety of these influences, beliefs, and styles when they first exhibited and met in Paris cafés to discuss art. Their rejection of the Academy and the Academy’s rejection of them united the group.

The Painting of Modern Life and Real Life Subjects

The sturdiest thread linking the Impressionists was an interest in the world around them. For subject matter, they looked to contemporary people at work and play. Inventions such as the steam engine, power loom, streetlights, camera, ready-made fashions, cast iron, and steel had changed the lives of ordinary people. Underlying the Industrial Revolution was a belief that technological progress was key to all human progress. In this climate of discovery, people felt they could do anything.

The Industrial Revolution brought economic prosperity to France, and Emperor Napoleon III set out to make Paris the showpiece of Europe. He hired civic planner Baron Hausmann, Prefect of the Seine, to replace the dirty, old medieval city with wide boulevards, parks, and monuments. The new steel-ribbed railroad stations and bridges were feats of modern engineering. Cafés, restaurants, and theaters lured the bourgeoisie, the powerful new merchant class who had made their homes in and around Paris.
Busy City and Quiet Countryside Settings

Most Impressionists were born in the bourgeoisie ("middle") class, and this was the world they painted. "Make us see and understand, with brush or with pencil, how great and poetic we are in our cravats and our leather boots," the poet Charles Baudelaire challenged his friend Édouard Manet. Baudelaire’s essay, The Painter of Modern Life, inspired other Impressionists to portray real life themes, too. Degas prowled behind the scenes of the opera and ballet for his subjects. Monet immortalized Paris railroad stations. Nearly all the Impressionist artists painted people hurrying through busy streets and enjoying their leisure time on the boulevard, at the racetrack, in café-concerts, shops, restaurants, and parks.

However, it was not just city bustle that intrigued the Impressionists. Country themes appealed to them, too. Railroads gave people a new mobility. They could hop on a train and be in the countryside in an hour. Commuters escaped the crowded city to the suburbs that sprouted around Paris. The Seine River, parks, and gardens provided recreation for weekend picnickers, swimmers, and boat parties, which the Impressionists duly recorded. One key to Impressionism’s popularity, it has been written, is that the artist often put the viewer in the position of someone on holiday enjoying a beautiful scene. "Monet never painted weekdays," one critic noted wryly.

The home offered other real-life subjects. It was unacceptable for women painters like Berthe Morisot or Mary Cassatt to set up an easel in most public places. They relied on domestic scenes of women from their own social class cuddling babies, playing with their children, dressing in the boudoir, or tending their gardens. The garden was central to late 19th-century life. Monet, Manet, and Renoir often painted their gardens. Monet called his flowerbeds "my most beautiful work of art."

En Plein Air and "The Painter of the Passing Moment"

Painting the sidewalk café, the racetrack, or the boating party attracted the Impressionists to work outdoors, or en plein air. Most Impressionists worked directly and spontaneously from nature. It was Barbizon painter Camille Corot who first advised artists to "submit to the first impression" of what they saw - a real landscape without the contrived classical ruins or Biblical parables of French Academic painting.

Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, and others preferred to record their initial sensory reactions rather than idealize a subject. A painter friend of Monet recalled the master giving him this advice: "He (Monet) said he wished he had been born blind and then had suddenly gained his sight so that he could have begun to paint in this way without knowing what the objects were that he saw before him. He held that the first real look at the motif was likely to be the truest and most unprejudiced one." The Impressionists thought that painting their experiences was more truthful, and thus more ethical, than copying the art of the past.

Impressionist landscapes often contained people, or showed the effects of man’s presence - on a bridge or path, for example. The Impressionists wanted to catch people in candid rather than staged or posed moments. It is as if the artist and we, the viewers, are watching a private, contemplative moment. We see men, women, and children floating in a rowboat, strolling under the trees, or just watching the river flow.

Impressionists often depicted people mid-task. Degas caught opera audience members watching each other instead of the stage and ballet dancers stretching or adjusting their costumes before a performance. Renoir’s guitar player strums her instrument by herself. Pissarro’s Parisian pedestrians hurriedly cross the city streets.
A wish to capture nature’s fleeting moment led many Impressionists to paint the same scene at different times and in different weather. They had to work fast to capture the moment, or to finish an outdoor painting before the light changed. Artists had often made quick sketches in pencil or diluted oil paint on location, but now the sketch became the finished work. Impressionist painters adopted a distinctive style of rapid, broken brushstrokes: lines for people on a busy street, or specks to re-create flowers in a meadow.

These artists often applied paint so thickly that it created a rough texture on the canvas. Impressionists mixed colors right on the canvas or stroked on the hues next to each other and let the viewer’s eye do the blending. This process was called optical color mixing. Not only did this sketchy technique suggest motion, but it also captured the shimmering effects of light that engaged these artists. The rough, brilliant paintings of Impressionism were a drastic departure from the slick, highly finished canvases of Academic painters. Although the Impressionists wanted their work to look almost accidental, it’s no surprise that early critics called it "lazy" and unfinished.

Consistent with the impressionists’ emphasis on direct observation, Luncheon of the Boating Party
captures the fleeting effects of changing light and color. The impressionists also championed scenes
of modern life, such as Luncheon of the Boating Party. However, the fresh, spontaneous feeling of
the work belies an arduous, six-month effort that would prove to be the pinnacle of Renoir’s career.

Storing and Using Paint

New technology in art materials made a wider range of color pigments available. In the past, artists had to grind and mix their own pigments with oil. Now, color merchants sold ready-to-use paints and other materials from storefront establishments. In addition, collapsible metal tubes replaced pigs-bladder pouches as storage vessels for paint. Tubes preserved the pigment longer, allowing artists to take extended painting trips outdoors.

which would you use: pig bladders or

metal paint tubes?

Renoir used metal oil paint tubes to be able to paint outdoors . This was a brand new innovation in Renoir's time, because before 1860, artists had to mix their own paint from chemicals and used pig bladders to store the paint in. Pig bladders were about the size of a walnut, and were difficult to travel outdoors with because they would break and also once the bladder was opened, the paint would quickly dry out.

Renoir's paintbox included metal paint tubes, a palette, a painter's rag, brushes and a palette knife.

In order to create such a complex work, an artist often begins with sketches on paper or small painted studies. Such preparatory works often provide valuable insights into the artist's creative process. Unfortunately, no drawings, oil studies, or any other preparatory exercises specific to Luncheon of the Boating Party are known to exist. All that remains of Renoir's process is embedded in the layers of paint on the canvas itself.

Recent technical studies, including x-radiography and infrared reflectography, have shown that Renoir made numerous changes to the canvas as he worked on the painting over a period of months. A letter written by the artist during the autumn of 1880 also indicates that he worked on individual figures as his models were available to pose for him and that he was struggling to resolve the final grouping of figures, the table setting, and the landscape. In recounting his progress, he complained of being behind schedule, of having to remove a figure ("in a word, today I've wiped her out"), and of his frustration with this ambitious project: "...I no longer know where I am with it, except that it is annoying me more and more."

Renoir persevered however, making changes that range from fine adjustments to the position of individual figures, to major additions, such as the red and white awning at the upper left. This change can be detected by the naked eye, in the pentimento around the hat of the bearded man under the awning at the left. The importance of this change can be understood when the viewer attempts to envision the painting without the awning. If an open sky and distant landscape had been retained, the three-dimensional illusion would have been difficult to achieve. By enclosing the top edge, the balcony's recession into space is more convincing, and the sitters are better defined as a cohesive group.

Although there is no documentation, Renoir presumably executed some of the work on the balcony of the Maison Fournaise. It is not, in any case, a work of art painted entirely out of doors, known as a plein air painting. The lengthy process of changing the composition and reworking the painting mostly occurred in the studio. Nevertheless, Renoir retained the freshness of his vision, even as he revised, rearranged and created an exquisitely crafted work of art.

Renoir to Berard: "I hope to see you in Paris on the first of October, for I am at Chatou. . . . I'm doing a painting of oarsmen which I've been itching to do for a long time. I'm not getting any younger, and I didn't want to defer this little festivity which later on I won't any longer be able to afford already it's very difficult.... Even if the enormous expenses I'm incurring prevent me from finishing my picture, it's still a step forward; one must from time to time attempt things that are

Making a Masterpiece

From the outset, Renoir consciously constructed an epic painting about modern life to surpass the earlier artistic achievement of Ball at the Moulin de la Galette (1876, Musée d'Orsay, Paris). Many art historians believe that Luncheon of the Boating Party, begun in the summer of 1880, may have been Renoir's response to a challenge from the famous writer and critic Emile Zola (1840-1902) in a June review of the official Salon exhibition of that year. Zola criticized the Impressionists for selling "sketches that are hardly dry" and challenged the artists to create complex paintings of modern life that were the result of "long and thoughtful preparation" and would establish "a new formula." With Luncheon of the Boating Party's ambitious scale, lengthy process of execution, and complex composition and subject matter, Renoir may have been striving to produce Zola's "masterpiece that is to lay down the formula...."

Renoir's reverence for the history of art, particularly the paintings in the Louvre, provided a source of inspiration throughout his career. In the case of Luncheon of the Boating Party, he may well have looked at such works as Paolo Veronese's lavish, banqueting scene, the Marriage Feast at Cana (1562-63, Musée du Louvre, Paris) and the flirtatious Rococo fête galante, Pilgrimage to Cythera (1717, Musée du Louvre, Paris) by Antoine Watteau.

Renoir masterfully created Luncheon of the Boating Party's mood of enchantment by capturing both the immediacy and specificity of a contemporary moment nineteenth-century leisure on the Seine and the universal appeal of human celebration. Moreover, he, in this canvas, combined several of the traditional categories of painting: still life, landscape, portraiture and genre. The result is a timeless painting that captures the atmosphere of an idyllic place, where friends share the pleasures of food, wine, and conversation.