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Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party,1880
In this painting, Renoir celebrates good company, good food, good wine, and good nature. We are in a place where both nature and human nature are calm and gentle; there’s no room for darkness in Renoir’s sunny world.
The setting is a restaurant on an island in the Seine at Chatou, a few miles outside of Paris (the river is visible in the upper left background). This is the heart of Impressionist leisure-land: not far up-river is the sailing centre of Argenteuil, featured in the paintings of Monet, Manet, and Caillebotte; just downriver is the swimming place of La Grenouillère, where Monet and Renoir inaugurated the Impressionist era in 1869.
Rowing was the main attraction for wealthy Parisians at Chatou, and Renoir’s diners wear the straw hats and blue dresses that were the fashionable boating attire of middle-class Parisian day-trippers. For like many Impressionist paintings, this is a completely middle-class image. 7 replies
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