Renoir's Invitation To A Party

APRIL 1997 | In his famous painting are actresses, journalists, a banker, a diplomat-and the country girl who became the painter's wife

- David Stewart

In the summer of 1880, guests assemble at the Restaurant Fournaise on an island in the Seine outside Paris. They will be immortalised by Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste Renoir. And his Luncheon of the Boating Party will become one of the world's most popular works of art.

I am convinced that one reason this painting compels our attention is that many of the people in it were Renoir's friends. Today, over 100 years later, scholars still argue about the identities of some of the models. But the stories of the boating party invite us into the painter's life.

The muscular, bearded man on the left is Alphonse Fournaise, who was responsible for boat rentals at Restaurant Fournaise. His father opened the restaurant on Chatou Island (part of which is now named Island of the Impressionists) around 1860.

The small islands in the Seine offered 19th-cenParisians tury the opportunity to indulge in two new sports-rowing and swimming that were all the rage. And there were festivals, dances, regattas, concerts and alfresco dining.

Poets and writers were among the first to discover these places. But it was the Impressionists, especially artists like Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, the American Mary Cassatt and Renoir, who captured these scenes most notably.

"You could find me any time at Fournaise's," Renoir once stated. "There I found as many splendid creatures as I could possibly paint." 

Aline Charignot, 21 (seated below Fournaise), wearing a bright straw hat, is one of the 'splendid creatures' Renoir found. A spirited country girl 18 years younger than the artist, she married him ten years later. She followed Renoir from poverty in Paris to comfort in Cagnes. Two of their three sons were wounded in World War One.