Aline Renoir, life of the party
This page presents a sidebar story to the Dali House post "He broke my heart so I busted his arm".
Click here for the main story.
Click the pic to see it much larger.
It was a monumental achievement, bursting from the depths of despair. Renoir had toured Europe and been humbled by what he'd seen, both in the classical masters and the modernists. He was in a crisis of doubt. "I had gone as far as impressionism could take me," he told Ambroise Vollard, "and I arrived at the conclusion that I could neither paint nor to draw. I was at a dead end."
"One cannot imagine these women, as they are here, having been painted by anybody else," Theodore Duret wrote in 1924. "They have the free and easy manners one would expect of young women who have lunched and are enjoying themselves with a group of young men, but they also have that graciousness, that roguish charm, which Renoir alone could give to women."
The website Expo-Renoir.com hastens to point out that, apart from Aline and her dog, Bob, no one is exchanging direct looks, suggesting that Renoir was uncomfortable with the mix of social classes. "Of all his dancing women and of all the women in this painting, ... he could not allow any to have such a good time as Aline."
The Phillips Collection in Washington DC, where today the painting has pride of place, further points out that in the upper left you can just make out the grey outline of the Chatou railroad bridge, then fairly new. The railway enabled Parisians to get out to spots like this in the surrounding countryside.
Chatou, Bougival, Asnières and Argenteuil soon had riverside amusements for these weekend tourists – the guinguettes (cafés that might offer music and dancing), bathhouses, boat rentals and sailing clubs. They went swimming at La Grenouillère in Bougival, where in 1869 Renoir and Monet first painted scenes of riverside leisure. In Argenteuil, where the river was wider, they sailed, and in Chatou they went rowing. Shown here is a detail from Renoir's "Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise (The Rowers’ Lunch)", from 1875.
Renoir had a 10-minute walk to the Saint-Lazare station from his Paris studio and often rode out to Chatou, where, on what is now called l'Ile des Impressionistes in honour of the good times enjoyed there by him, Monet, Sisley,
Morisot, Manet, Pissarro and others, he painted "Luncheon of the Boating Party" on the balcony of the Maison Fournaise.
"I was constantly spending my time chez Fournaise," Renoir once wrote. "There I found as many beautiful girls as one could ever wish to paint!" Another time he apologised for being late to see a friend because he was working in Chatou on this very painting. Or one of the ladies.
Who else is in this masterpiece of leisurely gesture and expression has long been a matter of amusement, and novelist Susan Vreeland is in May publishing a book, also called "Luncheon of the Boating Party", tracking the stories behind each of the characters in the painting.
It all looks like great fun, and it's easy to imagine Renoir off to one side dashing off sketches, or perhaps even prodding at paint, but of course no masterpiece comes easily. He spent months rearranging the scene and overpainting to resolve the final grouping of figures, tables, settings and landscape. At least one female character was deleted altogether. The striped awning was an afterthought, probably because the open sky was allowing the dimensionality of the scene to spread outward. The awning accentuates the balcony's recession and contains the group.
For all that labour, though, the scene is as fresh as a new day.
Now also a museum that exhibits Andre Derain and some minor 19th-century artists, La Maison Fournaise has since 1990 again been serving meals. When its restoration began in 1984, the Hamlet of Fournaise was founded to revive the island's historic and artistic atmosphere. It includes the National Centre of Engraving and Printed Art, the Association Sequana, which restores vintage Seine boats and two restaurants, the Fournaise and Les Rives de la Courtille.
Two websites from the current proprietors: the museum and the restaurant.
Aline is at the bottom left.
Everyone else is being rejected.
The Maison Fournaise, founded in 1857 by boatbuilder Alphonse Fournaise, rented skiffs, served meals and had rooms for the night. Renoir was a regular from 1868 to 1884 and painted Fournaise (detail seen here), his wife and their children Alphonsine and Alphonse Jr, sometimes swapping art for food and lodging.
Another regular at the restaurant, Guy de Maupassant, mentions it in several novels as the "restaurant Grillon". Chatou native André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck shared a studio in the Levanneur house near the restaurant. Guillaume Apollinaire and Henri Matisse visited frequently. 
Renoir painted three dozen pictures at Chatou, including this portrait of Alphonsine. She must have been quite a girl. She was close to Edgar Degas as well, and in "Boating Party" is seen gazing in the general direction of Gustave Caillebotte, all kitted out in his rowing gear.
Alphonsine leans on the railing just down from her brother, Alphonse Jr, who was in charge of the boat rentals at the maison.
The man in the top hat is the wealthy amateur art historian, collector and editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts Charles Ephrussi, speaking to a younger fellow in a brown coat and cap believed to be Jules Laforgue, a poet whose work influenced Yeats, Pound and TS Eliot and who became Ephrussi's personal secretary.
At the table next to Alphonsine, the model, Folies-Bergère mime and eventual actress Ellen Andrée sits with bowler-hatted Baron Raoul Barbier, a bon vivant and former mayor of Saigon. With them, a mystery man!
Chatting up the famous actress Jeanne Samary (star of the Comédie-Française and Renoir's former lover) are writer and adventurer Paul Lhote and Interior Ministry pencil-pusher and hypnotist Eugène Pierre Lestringez, both close friends and occasional models of Renoir.
At the table in front, Caillebotte looks like he's keen to get back in his skiff – or back to his paintbrushes – or is he admiring Aline? He's ignoring another actress, Angèle, as she gossips with Italian journalist Antonio Maggiolo, perhaps about her next turn on stage singing Offenbach.
In 1906 it fell to Alphonsine to close the house. She moved elsewhere and died in 1937, and in the meantime the buildings fell apart for want of cheery company. Finally, in 1977, the City of Chatou bought the site, and in 1982 the old restaurant was officially recognised for its historic significance and restored.
Drop buy and buy a cardboard model of the Maison Fournaise, only three euros.
