Luncheon of the Boating Party
l u n c h e o n o f t h e
b o a t i n g p a r t y
v
A l s o b y S u s a n V r e e l a n d
Life Studies
The Forest Lover
The Passion of Artemisia
Girl in Hyacinth Blue
L a M a i s o n F o u r n a i s e
Susan Vreeland
Luncheon
of the
B oat i ng Par t y
• v i k i n g •
v i k i n g
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offi ces: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in 2007 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Susan Vreeland, 2007. All rights reserved
La Maison Fournaise
by Jacques Bracquemond (gravure au burin).
Copyright Association des Amis de la Maison Fournaise, Chatou, France.
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
l i b r a r y o f c o n g r e s s c a t a l o g i n g i n p u b l i c a t i o n d a t a Vreeland, Susan.
Luncheon of the boating party / Susan Vreeland.
p. cm.
ISBN: 1-4295-3229-7
1. Renoir, Auguste, 1841–1919—Fiction. 2. Renoir, Auguste, 1841–1919. Luncheon of the boating
party—Fiction.
3. Painters—France—Fiction. 4. Impressionism (Art)—Fiction.
I.
Title.
PS3572.R34L86 2007
813'.54—dc22
2006035324
Set in Granjon • Designed by Amy Hill
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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To him who is specially hers,
Joseph Kip Gray,
from she who is singularly his,
In memory of his brother,
Michael Francis Gray
To my mind, a picture should be something
pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There
are too many unpleasant things in life as it is
without creating still more of them.
—Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin
it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Contents
Looking for Mademoiselle Angèle
•
xi
•
C o n t e n t s
•
xii
•
l u n c h e o n o f t h e
b o a t i n g p a r t y
C h a p t e r O n e
La Vie Moderne
20 July 1880
He rode the awkward steam-cycle along the ridge to catch
glimpses of the domes and spires of Paris to the east, then turned west and careened headlong down the long steep hill toward the village of Bougival and the Seine. With his right elbow cast in plaster, he could barely reach the handlebar, but he had to get to the river. Not next week.
Not tomorrow. Now. Idleness had been itching him worse than the maddening tickle under the cast. Only painting would be absorbing enough to relieve them both. Steam hissed out of the engine, but it built up inside of him.
He reached down to open the throttle wider. The soft morning
light would be flattened to a glare by the time he got there if he didn’t let her go all out. The piston beat faster in the cylinder until it became a whir of sound, the poplars and chestnuts along the road a blur of greens, the blooming
genêts
a blaze of yellow, with the blue-green sweep of the river coming closer and closer. A painting! He was plunging into a painting! Down and down he plunged. Warm summer air filled his nose with the fragrance of honeysuckle, and the low-pitched honk of a tugboat urged him onward. At the base of the hill, he checked behind him to see that his folding easel, canvas, and Bazille’s wooden color box were still strapped on.
The three-wheeled cycle took the humped bridge at Bougival fi ne, but the coarse sand on the narrow, connected islands made the front wheel wobble.
•
1
•
S u s a n V r e e l a n d
All types of
canots
—rowing yoles, sailboats, and racing sculls—tied to posts along the riverbank produced inverted images quivering in the lazy current, deliciously paintable. But not today. They were empty of life. On Sundays, though, every laundress with her chapped red arms, every shopgirl, mail clerk, butcher, and banker, Parisians of all classes took their leisure either on the Seine or in it or along its grassy slopes.
La Grenouillère, The Frog Pond, one of the many rustic
guinguettes
along the river that provided food, music, and dancing, had a lonely air about it now compared to Sundays. Then, pleasure-loving Parisians threw off their city restraints and filled the floating café, shouted from rented rowboats, splashed each other in the shallow eddies, picnicked along the bank, drank and danced on the anchored barge—the way he and Claude Monet had painted it a decade ago. They had slapped each other on the back the day they’d discovered that juxtaposed patches of contrasting color could show the movement of sunlit water. What he would give for another day like that one, for that thrill of breaking new ground. Repeating safe, easy methods portrait after portrait, as he’d been doing lately, was suffocating him.