Luncheon of the boating party, Oil on canvas, 129.5 cm. x 172.7 cm., 1876. Phillips Memorial Gallery, Washington, DC. (Durand-Ruel's private collection until 1923).

There is even few books devoted to Auguste Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, Susan Vreeland’s “The Passion of Artemisia” as example, which story is set in 1880, the year in which Pierre Auguste Renoir commenced and almost completed his larger-than-life, 14-person study of a happy group of Sunday pleasure boaters at leisure on a restaurant balcony by the Seine. The setting is Paris and the villages around it that are watered by that beautiful, meandering river. The characters are Renoir and his friends, an amazing array of artistic and literary talents, some of whom can be readily identified in the painting. For that matter, all but one of Renoir’s 14 models has been identified and there is consensus that the mystery person is either Guy de Maupassant or Renoir himself...

There is some of still life in this painting, shimmering patterns of the light fixtures, children--like the dainty blonde creature in the lower left--tucked in here and there. One even fancies that the buzz of voices, the shuffle of feet, and the gay dance tune are part of the composition. The Boating Party celebrates the triumph of youth: the women are radiantly beautiful, the men as dashing and debonair as young blades ought to be. Renoir has become famous as a painter of the nude; but what painter has clothed the human form more entrancingly? And with unbelievable virtuosity, he has animated his figures with an amazing variety of postures and activities, bold, relaxed, eager, withdrawn, flirtatious, all of them graceful and natural. The Luncheon of the Boating Party is one of Renoir's largest and most ambitious compositions; yet he was not to regard it as one of his best paintings. Despite its apparent crowding and turbulence, it reveals a studied organization. The triangular foreground group is related through silhouette and color to the group at the trees; and this group, through yellow and gold-brown tones, becomes part of a vertical unit which provides stability to the right of the canvas. The other side allows easy entrance into space over a ground dappled blue and pink--Renoir's way of creating the effect of sunlight and shadow without introducing neutral dark values. By emphasizing the verticality of the dancing figures through sharp color contrasts, Renoir echoes verticality again, and repeats it playfully in the posts in the background.