Luncheon of the Boating Party

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I'm reading Edmund de Waal's book The Hare With Amber Eyes in which he 

writes about Renoir's well known painting Luncheon of the Boating Party:

"This was to be the setting of Renoir's bravura Le Déjeuner des canotiers, the Luncheon of the 

Boating Party.  It shows a pleasingly louche afternoon at the Maison Fournaise, a restaurant  by 

the Seine at one of the newly popular places that Parisian day-trippers could reach by train. 

Pleasure boats and a skiff can be seen through the silvery-grey willows. A red-and-white striped 

awning protects the party from the glare of the sun. It is after lunch in Renoir's new world of 

painters, patrons and actresses, and everyone is a friend. Models smoke, drink and talk amongst 

the detritus of the empty bottles and the meal left on the tables. There are no rules or regulations 

here.

The actress Ellen Andrée, in a hat with a flower pinned to it, raises her glass to her lips. Baron 

Raoul Barbier, a former mayor of colonial Saigon, his brown bowler hat pushed back, talks to the 

young daughter of the proprietor. Her brother, straw-hatted like a professional oarsman, stands in 

the foreground surveying the lunch. Caillebotte, relaxed and fit in a white singlet and boater, sits 

astride his chair looking at the young seamstress Aline Charigot, Renoir's lover and future wife. 

The artist Paul Lhote sits with a proprietorial arm around the actress Jeanne Samary. It is a 

matrix of smiling conversation and flirtation.

And Charles is there. He is the man at the very back, in the top hat and black suit, turning slightly 

away, seen glancingly. You can just see his red-brown beard. He is talking with a pleasantly open-

faced, poorly shaved Laforgue, dressed as a proper poet in a working man's cap and what could 

even be a corduroy jacket.

I doubt that Charles really wore his benedictine clothes, heavy and dark, to a boating party in the 

summer sunshine, a top hat instead of a boater. This is an in-joke about his Mécène uniform 

between friends, Renoir suggesting that patrons and critics are needed, somewhere in the 

background, on the edge, even on the sunniest and most liberated of days.

Proust writes of this picture, noting a 'gentleman . . . wearing a top hat at a boating party where 

he was clearly out of place, which proved that for Elstir he was not only a regular sitter, but a 

friend, perhaps a patron'.

Charles is clearly out of place, but he is a sitter, friend and patron and he is there. Charles 

Ephrussi - or a least the back of Charles's head - enters art history."

Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Le déjeuner des canotiers, 1880–1881, Oil on canvas
129.5 cm × 172.7 cm (51 in × 68 in)
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

Here are the models: