Luncheon morsels and 'a little plan'

One of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's most beloved works is the charming moment captured in Luncheon of the Boating Party, which many of you may have had occasion to enjoy at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. He managed to meld landscape, still life, portraiture and genre painting into an intimate unified composition, while somehow gracefully balancing two figures on the left with a dozen on the right. Despite the crowded table, there is still a welcoming spot waiting for us at the forefront.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880–81. Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

The scene depicts one of the many boating and lunch outings celebrated by Renoir and the group of friends and acquaintances pictured here at the Maison Fournaise restaurant on the Seine river in Chatou, a 20 minute train ride west of Paris. The painting, according to the artist's son Jean in his book Renoir, My Father (see earlier post on the filmmaker and playwright's recollection of his painter father), "was the crowning achievement of a long series of pictures, studies and sketches" done at the restaurant during the 1870s.
 
Here is an actual postcard from that time showing what the restaurant and surrounding area looked like when it was frequented by Renoir and friends just a few years before he painted the famed luncheon group. I have clipped it from an excellent artistic and historical analysis of the painting that you can find here at the Phillips Collection website.

Postcard of the Maison Fournaise and Seine river, 1870s. © Musée Fournaise, Chatou-France

At the time, the restaurant was popularly known as the "Grenouillére", literally, the "frog pond". And this was "not from the numerous batrachians which swarmed in the surrounding fields". The term grenouilles, frogs, was used to describe

... a class of unattached young women, characteristic of the scene before and after the Empire, changing lovers easily, satisfying any whim, going nonchalantly from a mansion in the Champs Elysées to a garret in the Batignolles. To them we owe the memory of a Paris which was brilliant, witty and amusing.

Among that group, moreover, Renoir got a great many of his volunteer models... Because French people love a medley of classes, actresses, society women and respectable middle-class people also patronized the Fournaise restaurant. The tone of it was set by young sportsmen in striped jerseys, who vied with one another to become accomplished boatmen.

Much has been written on the mix of boatmen, artists, patrons, actresses, restaurant owner and others who are gathered around this table. For more information on this festive cast of characters, you can do no better than to visit the informative and enjoyable website devoted to Susan Vreeland's novel Luncheon of the Boating Party.

I will only pick at some choice morsels from this luscious meal. Here, apart from briefly mentioning that the young woman happily playing with the dog is Renoir's beloved Aline Charigot, later to become his wife, I wanted to discuss one of the guests, the gentleman in the yellow straw hat and sleeveless maillot at the bottom right, the engineer, heir to a bank fortune, painter, art patron, yachtsman and close friend of Renoir's: Gustave Caillebotte.

Gustave Caillebotte is a somewhat unsung hero of the Impressionist movement. Born into a family of bankers, he resisted the pressure to follow his father's profession and instead threw himself into what he most loved: painting. According to Jean Renoir, Caillebotte "painted with as much passion as any member of the Impressionist group". Although not always considered an Impressionist painter, in part due to the realism of his paintings, he did exhibit with them. And he became a great friend, patron and financial and moral backer and determined advocate for that group of struggling young "intransigents", as they called themselves.

Below is The Floor Scrapers, one of his paintings. He displayed it at the second Impressionist exhibition of 1876, for which he received, again according to Jean Renoir, "his share of criticism and insults". One of the objections that barred the doors of the official Salon to him in this work was his choice of subject. The urban proletariat were just not considered the proper object of a "serious" artist's attention. While the idealized depictions of peasants and farmers by Millet and others had begun to find favor with the Academy's arbiters of high art, the same did not go for people who toiled in cities.

Gustave Caillebotte, 1875. Les raboteurs de parquet (The Floor Scrapers). Musee d'Orsay, Paris

In Jean Renoir's account of his father's reaction to the painting

Renoir praised it, and Caillebotte, being an exceedingly modest man, had blushed. He was only too well aware of his limitations. "I try to paint honestly, hoping that some day my work will be good enough to hang in the antechamber of the living-room where the Renoirs and Cézannes are hung".

At the recent Impressionist exhibition in Madrid (see earlier post on the Impressionist show at Fundación Mapfre), I was able to see this painting and found it quite striking. I even found myself looking at the floor below the painting to see if I could spot any wood shavings that may have wafted down. In recent years, Caillebotte's works have been drawing renewed attention from art historians and receiving greater due (see the highly interesting essay, "Odd Man In: A Brief Historiography of Caillebotte's Changing Roles in The History of Art" by Kirk Varnedoe, chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC).

What is beyond all dispute is the valuable contribution he made to the early Impressionists as they struggled to eke out an existence. His financial support, especially for Monet, was crucial. Caillebotte funded exhibitions, paid studio rents, bought several dozen of their paintings and helped keep them together when disputes arose and threatened to irreparably disrupt the movement.

And in 1876, when he wrote his will, he came up with a "little plan" to definitively elevate the Impressionist upstarts to what he felt was their rightful place in the art world, a plan that would not be activated until his death in 1894 at the age of 45. Again, Jean Renoir recalls what his father told him of this generous friend and patron:

 Caillebotte had gathered the most important collection of his friends' works. His enthusiastic purchases were often made just in the nick of time for those who benefited by them. How many artists in financial straits at the end of the month were saved by his generosity and farsightedness. "He had his own little plan ... He was a sort of Joan of Arc of painting".

Gustave Caillebotte — Paris Street- Rainy Weather 1877. Art Institute of Chicago.

Caillebotte willed his collection of nearly 70 paintings (almost all by Impressionists) to the French government, on the condition that they be shown at the Luxembourg Palace (where living artists were exhibited) and then at the Louvre. He hoped the French government would not dare to refuse it. The ostracism still faced by the Impressionists would thus be vanquished and they would finally have their place of honor in the great museum of French and world art. That was Caillebotte's "little plan".

Sadly, the government did not accept the terms. Renoir, as executor of Caillebotte's will, had to carry on the very complicated and unpleasant negotiations. His son Jean describes the outcome:

Everyone knows the sequel. At least two thirds of this unique collection, one of the greatest in the world, was turned down. The remaining third did not get past the doors of the Louvre, but was stored away in the Luxembourg Museum. On the death of Charlotte Caillebotte, those works which had been rejected went to various heirs, who got rid of them as quickly as possible. Scorned by France, they were well received in foreign countries. A good many were bought in the United States. I tell this story to any French friend who accuses Americans of having emptied France of its masterpieces by means of the almighty dollar.

The exact number of paintings almost reluctantly accepted by the French government and stored at the Luxembourg museum was 38. They eventually went on to form the core of the Musée d'Orsay's Impressionist collection. The French government did finally change its mind in 1928 and tried to claim the inheritance of the rest of the paintings from Caillebotte's marvelous collection, but the bequest was repudiated by the heirs (Caillebotte's widowed daughter-in-law), and most of those paintings were purchased by Albert C. Barnes and are now held by the Barnes Foundation near Philadelphia. For more on Caillebotte and a slideshow of some of his major works, see the website Gustave Caillebotte — The Complete Works.

One more person in the Renoir luncheon that I wanted to point out is the young woman holding the glass of wine to her mouth near the center of the composition: Ellen Andrée, an actress who modeled for Renoir (as well as for Degas). You may recall that in the delightful film Amelie, Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party was the painting copied once a year for the last 20 years by Amelie's reclusive artist neighbor, Richard Dufayel. In the movie the figure of Ellen Andrée comes to be associated, at least for Dufayel, with Amelie. If you have not seen Amelie, you probably really should be doing that instead of reading my blog. Perhaps I should have said that at the beginning of this very long post.

Dufayel, Amelie and 'Renoir'

Well, this luncheon is about over now.  I apologize for the length of this post, but here in Spain, as in France, the sobremesa, the leisurely hours spent at the luncheon table after the main eating is done, whiling away the minutes and hours in conversation and friendship, tend to be the best part of the meal. Whet your appetite with the brief video (make sure to put it on 720 HD and full screen) to luxuriate at the table with this now venerable group of boaters cum luncheoners and then click here to see what other Theme Thursday participants have served for lunch.

An everyday eternity without the boasting ...

In today's post I take warm note of two anniversaries. The first is the birthday of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, born in Limoges, France, in 1841 (pictured here in the portrait done in 1867 by his friend and fellow Impressionist pioneer Frederic Bazille).

I just recently finished reading Renoir, My Father, a wonderful recollection and re-creation of the painter by his son, the filmmaker and playwright Jean Renoir (originally published by Little, Brown in 1962; current edition by the New York Review of Books, 2001). The very first line of the book reads: "In April 1915 a Bavarian sharpshooter did me the favor of putting a bullet through my leg". The wound sent him home from combat in World War I and allowed him to spend time while convalescing with his aged and ailing father, at that time emotionally crushed by the death of his wife and severely hobbled by the rheumatoid arthritis that tortured him in his later years (the description of Renoir bobbing back and forth from his wheelchair before the canvas, working with paintbrushes strapped to the wrists below his terribly deformed hands, is wincingly and wondrously wrought).

The book is largely based on the long conversations that ensued between the two house and wheelchair-bound men. Jean was 21 at the time, Auguste was 74 and would die four years later. The son took no notes and made no written record of those talks and did not even begin writing the recollection until the 1950s, nearly 40 years later, when he was getting on in years himself.

So Renoir, My Father is at the same time much less and much more than a biography: less because it is admittedly non-rigorous, incomplete and unreliable in its treatment of the facts, but much more because Jean Renoir has filled that factual void with a very moving nostalgic reminiscence of his father, an impressionistic evocation of the man. Eventually the two personalities seem to merge in what Robert L. Herbert's introduction calls "an effervescent blend of nostalgia for an earlier era".

Renoir: Monet painting in his garden at Argenteuil, 1873

One of the main characteristics of Renoir that comes through in the book is the rejection and utter scorn he felt for any and all notion of epic storytelling, preaching, teaching, exemplifying, moralizing and dramatizing in his art. His lone mission was to practice the "cult of nature", to "ensnare the light, and throw it directly onto the canvas" (in Monet's phrase), "to plunge enthusiastically into this pool of impressions of nature, which constitute the 'credo' of the new painting". The then dominant Romantic School

"still felt the need of a nature that was dramatic. Renoir and his friends were in the process of realizing that the world, even in its most banal aspects, is a thing of wonder and delight. 'Give me an apple tree in a suburban garden. I haven't the slightest need of Niagara Falls'."

A trip to Italy, especially southern Italy, played a pivotal role in the development of Auguste's artistic philosophy:

"I was tired of the skill of the Michelangelos and the Berninis: too many draped figures, too many folds, too many muscles! I like painting best when it looks eternal without boasting about it: an everyday eternity, revealed on the street corner; a servant-girl pausing a moment as she scours a saucepan, and becoming a Juno on Olympus ...

... The Italians don't deserve any credit for great painting. They just have to look around them. Italian streets are crowded with pagan Gods and Biblical characters. Every woman nursing a child is a Raphael Madonna."

He talked again about this last impression, dwelling on the curve of a brown breast and the chubby hand that clutched it. The Pompeian frescoes struck him for many other reasons: "They didn't bother about theories. There was no searching for volumes, and yet the volumes are there. And they could get such rich effects with so little!" He never ceased to marvel at the color range of those ancient artists: earth colors, vegetable dyes, seeming rather dull when used by themselves, but brilliant by contrast. "And you feel they were not striving to bring forth a masterpiece. A tradesman or a courtesan wanted a house decorated. The painter honestly tied to put a little gaiety on the wall—and that was all. No genius; no soul-searching".

Other quotes:

— "But the ideal of simplicity is almost impossible to achieve."

— "The reason for this decadence is that the eye has lost the habit of seeing."

According to Jean Renoir, "the idea that the intellect was superior to the senses was not an article of faith" with his father. "It is the eye of the sensualist that I wish to open" is how the painter stated his mission. He was deeply distrustful of imagination: "We have to have a devilish amount of vanity to believe that what comes out of our brain is more valuable than what we see around us. Imagination doesn't take us very far, whereas the world is so immense".

Like Bazille's portrait of Renoir above, Renoir's The Swing (La Balançoire), 1876, shown here, is from the Musée d'Orsay and currently part of the Impressionist exhibition at the Fundación Mapfre in Madrid).

And the second anniversary is much closer to home,  as close to home as one can ever get. Fifty-four years ago today, February 25, 1956, the creators and loving caretakers of my everyday eternity were married, my parents, Isabel and Albert, shown in this 1955 photo in Venezuela. Happy anniversary, mom and dad.

Magpie sighting — the Impressionists are here ...

Ever since our good friend willow of Life at Willow Manner formally declared herself a magpie and a practitioner of magpiety, I have been on the lookout for that preeminent scavenger of the avian world. Happily enough, I soon spotted my very first one, perched atop a rickety wooden fence gate, contemplating the sunny snow-blanketed countryside on the coast of Normandy in Etretat  …

Well, I wasn't actually there, but did make the sighting through this 1869 painting by Claude Monet, The Magpie, currently on view at the Fundación Mapfre in Madrid.

The snowy scene is part of the wonderful “From Manet to Impressionism: A Modern Renaissance” show which opened in mid-January and will be gracing Madrid’s magnificent "museum mile" until April 22nd. Apparently, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, home to the world’s greatest Impressionism collection, is partly closed to undergo major works before it reopens to celebrate its 25th anniversary in March 2011. So the museum has now arranged for many of its essential works to leave Paris, some for the first time. A good 90 or more are on view in the Madrid show (fresh in from Australia before moving on to San Francisco). This unique and perhaps never to be repeated opportunity includes works by Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Bazille, Millet, Renoir, Rousseau, Sisley, Toulouse-Lautrec, and others.

Obviously, the show is a joy and deserves a book. I am sure I will post more on a few of the masterpieces that I found especially striking. But today and in future posts (because this has become rather too long) I wanted to discuss this lonely magpie. The painting caught my eye immediately, although I have to confess that when I first glimpsed it from a distance, I thought I was seeing a Sisley (who is also well represented in the show with his own snowscape).

Claude Monet (shown to the right in a portrait by Renoir which is also part of the Madrid exhibit) painted The Magpie between 1868 and 1869, and it is widely considered one of the first Impressionist paintings, although it predates the first Impressionist show and the very name by five years (one of the names these painters were using amongst themselves was 'the Intransigents'). He submitted the work to the Académie des Beaux-Arts to be exhibited at the 1869 Paris Salon, but it was rejected. The Paris Salon was the all-powerful arbiter of official taste and had by that time begun making a routine of rejecting the daring new works by a group of artists that had not yet been dubbed Impressionists – Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Bazille, Pissarro.

Indeed it was the Salon's 1863 rejection of Edouard Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass — shown below), along with works by many other artists, and the ensuing controversy, that would come to mark a turning point of sorts. The Salon expressed its refusal to accept Luncheon on the Grass in rather abrasive terms, in large part focused on the impropriety of depicting a nude woman in other than a historical or mythological context and, even more vexingly, in the casual company of two clothed men. Manet began to explore other opportunities and became a rallying point and inspiration for the small but committed group of artists who would give the world the Impressionist movement in the years that followed. The Madrid exhibit begins and ends with Manet, highlighting his role as the first and prime mover for the group and an important early source of leadership, encouragement and even economic support.

Something was already astir in the Parisian art world, as evidenced by the fact that the Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Refused or Rejects), which Emperor Napoleon III decreed be held in 1863 as a show for the unusually large number of paintings rejected by the Académie that year, actually drew more visitors than the regular Salon.

Since this is becoming a rather long post, I will break here and return to our magpie in part 2 in the days to come. I will close by embedding below a brief video (in English) on the exhibit. Enjoy ...