Luncheon of the Boating Party

by Susan Vreeland

  “Julien, it’s only a name. You don’t have to prove your principles.”

  “I spit on anything Prussian. Arrogant brutes, commandeering Pissarro’s house during the war. Walking on his paintings so they wouldn’t muddy their boots.” His face tightened with pain. “Only forty canvases saved of fifteen hundred. And squeezing our national treasury for war reparations. Inhuman.”

  “France paid every last franc. Five billion! And ahead of time too!” Madame said, beady-eyed, her chin thrust in Auguste’s direction. “How’s that for principles?”

  “No Prussian blue,” Tanguy said. “To foreigners, I sell it. To amateurs too. But I will not have Prussian blue in the Louvre!”

  Auguste chortled. “You’re sure of where this is going, then, are you?”

  “Bien sûr!” He folded his arms across his chest. “You know what it’s made of? Blood, flesh, bone-black, soot. I won’t have those disgusting things on your French painting! Use French ultramarine.”

  “I will, for some things, but I also need that inky quality of Prussian blue. The canotières will be in dark blue dresses.”

  “You never had it in your palette before,” Julien said.

  “I never had so many canotières in one painting before. You wouldn’t want them undressed, would you?”

  “Use cobalt.”

  “Too transparent. It has a greenish undertone. I need the finest grade of Prussian blue, well washed to keep it from fading.”

  “Non!” He put his hands on his hips. “C’est final!”

  Tanguy picked the other tubes off the shelf, holding them all against his chest. “You don’t need burnt sienna or burnt umber?”

  “I can make them with these.”

  “These won’t last for a painting that large. Come back when you need more,” Tanguy said.

  Madame Tanguy blew out a breath that lifted the lank brown bangs on her forehead. “Don’t glop it on like Claude does and you won’t need so much.”

  “What’s the condition of your brushes?” Tanguy asked.

  “He likes his old ones,” Madame said, thrusting out her jaw.

  The perfect Xantippe, Auguste thought. As commanding as Socrates’ wife.

  “You can’t paint a masterpiece with brushes worn down to the nubs. You need to start fresh, with no residual color.”

  “They won’t feel like mine.”

  “You’ll make them your own in no time. Don’t scrimp on this.”

  “You remind me of my father’s friend, the assistant of Sanson, the state executioner during the Revolution. When I was a boy the old man and my father liked to say that one of them cut out cloth, the other cut off heads. One needed sharp scissors, the other a sharp guillotine blade. Their nonchalance shocked me then, but they agreed on the vital importance of a workman’s tools.”

  “So, there you have it. What do you need? A filbert?”

  “Yes, in marten hair, number oh-two, and two hog’s hair, wide and medium.”

  “I give you the best, two Isabeys, made with great care by Bretons, my countrymen.”

  While Tanguy was getting them, Madame darted behind the curtain a moment and then turned her back to wrap the tubes in newspaper and tie them with string. “If you can’t pay, at least you can bring us a buyer for these Cézannes, another one like Monsieur Chocquet.”

  Julien patted her arm. “Don’t worry, Fionie. The amateurs who will disappear in ten years, I make them pay up front.”

  Auguste placed two ten-franc coins on the counter, only a fraction of the cost. Fionie slapped her hand on top of them.

  “Thanks for trusting me for the rest. You have a big heart.”

  “Ah, yes, he does. We’re going to have roast trust for dinner tonight, and terrine de patience Montmartrois tomorrow. The next night”—she thrust her chin toward Julien in an exaggerated glare—“brochette of heart à la Communard.” She stuck a brush behind each of Auguste’s ears, the filbert under his cast, and looped the cord of the rolled canvas over his shoulder so he could carry it. “There. Now stay off that silly engine!”

  Auguste dropped off the supplies at his studio and walked the half dozen blocks to Gustave’s apartment on boulevard Haussmann. Lined with elegant cafés and smart shops, the boulevard was clearly a different neighborhood than his own. He entered beneath the gilt ironwork, went up two flights, and pulled the bell cord. Piano music stopped. Gustave’s brother, a composer, let him in.

  “He’s painting on the balcony,” Martial said.

  “Then I won’t interrupt him.”

  Auguste lingered in the foyer to look at Gustave’s painting collection, one reason why he came. There were several by Claude, a luncheon in his garden, a regatta at Argenteuil, and Gare Saint-Lazare. Both Sisley’s and Pissarro’s versions of the street in Louveciennes showing his mother’s ocher cottage and her prized trumpet vines always moved him. Degas’ pastel of the Café Nouvelle-Athènes with four faded prostitutes made him wonder what one of them meant by that gesture of flicking her thumbnail against her top front tooth. Maybe it meant, Not even a sou tonight.

  None of these were what he’d come to see, the two paintings he knew would open the wound of remorse. He had a phantom model to consider. Margot. Panic gripped him. She wasn’t in her usual place. Gustave owned so many that he rotated them. Auguste strode into the drawing room. His own Bal au Moulin de la Galette was there, and Margot, dancing. Her gaiety vibrated in the mottled light of the outdoor dance hall under the acacias. He loved the freshness and innocence of the place, so he didn’t think it hubris to love his painting of it. He studied it. Yes, he could surpass it. He would surpass it. He had to.

  But where was La balançoire?

  He checked the dining room. Not there. The study. Ah, there. Margot. She had a place all to herself. Margot in her pink dress with blue bows down the front standing on a swing talking to two men in the leafy garden of the studio he’d rented on the Butte, Montmartre d’en haut. Three people snatching a few hours of pleasure to last them the whole week.

  He stepped close and stroked her cheek. She wasn’t a raving beauty. Her face was a bit too chubby and her hair was thin and lifeless, but oh, her spirit. He remembered the sweltering summer day when she had jumped into the fountain of place Pigalle, fully dressed, and splashed him. Her zest would have been perfect for his new painting. She had done some good things with him, Cup of Chocolate, Lovers and Confidences, and Woman with a Cat.

  But the one good thing he could have done for her in return, he hadn’t done. The one thing any responsible lover would have done. Regret made him unable to stand still in front of her now. A year and a half ago. He had allowed the worst to happen.

  He searched her eyes for forgiveness, but her gaze was slightly to the side, so it offered him no answers. He didn’t even know whether she had forgiveness in her nature. He’d never asked her the important things. He just used her the way Monet used the Seine and Pissarro used the boulevards, as a pretext to study light flickering through the trees onto her face and dress.

  He had painted a study of her from memory, the one time he’d forsaken his rule of working only from the live model. If she were here, she would be in his new painting. She would bring out the best in him, out of his love for her, out of her love for him, and this painting at this critical time in his life had to be his best.

  He could ignore his credo once more and put her in. He could study the paintings he still had of her, and ask Gustave to lend him The Swing. It could be a means of making amends. The thought lifted him momentarily, but two lost women might tinge the painting with sadness. And if he broke his credo the second time, it might crumble to bits. He could not risk that.

  Inès, the orange cat, rubbed up against his leg and interrupted his deliberations. He went back into the drawing room and looked at Gustave’s self-portrait showing him at work in this very room, with a man sitting on the flowered sofa, legs crossed, reading, and above the painted sofa hung his own Bal au Moulin de la Galette. It always gave h
im a start, his painting within Gustave’s painting, a tribute to their mutual regard. Now he could return the recognition and give Gustave a favorable position in the foreground of his new painting.

  He made his way between potted plants and enormous bouquets, walking around Gustave’s pointer dog, Mame, asleep on the Oriental carpet, past a replica of Houdon’s sculpture of a lanky male nude. On the balcony he found Gustave painting in his cream-colored artisan’s blouse, blue cotton cap, and linen shoes. Amusing. This son of a textile magnate who had supplied the French army, this self-effacing son who had inherited a fortune, dressing like a common laborer, while laborers who used to wear their workmen’s clothes with pride even on Sundays now pretend they’re gentlemen in ready-mades.

  They were two painters, though opposites in a way, highborn and low, but occasions allowed or required them to dress in the clothes of their unnatural selves. Two selves for both of them. What devilishness of nature to toss such ambiguities of identity at them.

  Two men posed looking down on boulevard Haussmann. Auguste nodded to one of them, Marcellin Desboutin, an engraver who frequented the Café Nouvelle-Athènes, a writer of verse tragedies. What an impossible thing to sell. No wonder he was also working as a model. He slouched back against the building in a bowler hat with his hands stuffed in his casual jacket pockets. Auguste didn’t know the top-hatted gentleman posing in black frock coat leaning forward on the railing. Now, there’s a difference between us, Auguste thought. I would have a man and a woman on this balcony.

  Gustave turned toward him. “Ah, Auguste.” He told the men they could take a break and ring for a café in the dining room. By the fluid way the two models glided across the drawing room, Auguste could tell they’d been here often, and not just as models. He envied Gustave always being able to paint out of love, and doing his best work because of it, painting after painting.

  “How very democratic of you,” Auguste said. “Grand bourgeois with petit bourgeois, yet together in a private space. People are going to wonder.”

  “Some flâneurs will know. Those snide observers strolling the boulevards and picking apart society in the weekly journals.” He dipped his brush in turpentine and cleaned it with a rag. “The morals brigade will skewer me.”

  “You’re courageous.”

  “Only by proxy.”

  Auguste studied the plunging perspective on the unfinished canvas, and the difference in size of the figures as a way to give the illusion of depth on the balcony. He came inside to look at Gustave’s overpowering painting of a Paris street on a rainy day. Same achievement of perspective. And again on Pont de l’Europe displaying Gustave himself as a wealthy flâneur glancing toward a laborer leaning on the bridge railing, with his dog connecting them.

  “Your unusual perspectives draw a person right in. There aren’t any boundaries between the scene and where I’m standing. You eclipse us all in inventiveness.”

  “Zola called it my ‘curious artistic personality.’” Gustave stepped over Mame and sat on the sofa. Instantly Inès curled up on his lap.

  “Zola be hanged. You know who you are. Me, on some days I’m sorry I wasn’t Ingres. Other days I’m sorry I’m not Monet. You make Impressionism and academic painting work together, modern subjects but conservative brushwork. You thumb your nose at the critics.”

  “So could you, you know.” Gustave rubbed the cat under her chin.

  “Easy for you to say. You who can tell the Salon jury to suck eggs and you’ll still eat at Café Riche and spread out in ten rooms without ever having to sell a square meter of canvas for your rent.”

  “Eight rooms.” Gustave offered him a cigarette and lit it for him. “I thought you were staying at Louveciennes for the summer.”

  “I was, until I read Zola’s review.”

  “He’s a two-headed bull,” Gustave declared. “Next year he’ll say the opposite of what he says this year. He said my Floor Scrapers was too tight. Too tidy. Too…too…too. He called me anti-artistic, said I paint with pedestrian exactitude. Later he said I’m courageous. Don’t pay him any attention.”

  “You don’t mean that. When other critics read Zola, they’ll repeat his opinion like lemmings and will predict the failure of Impressionism too.”

  Gustave scowled. “And then the group won’t hold.”

  “So I want to make him eat his words. For all our sakes. And I have a subject that can make him do that. The terrace of Maison Fournaise.”

  “Finally! Bravo!”

  Auguste traced the pattern of the brocade on the arm of his chair. “Not that I’m ready, mind you.”

  “We’re never as ready as we’d like to be. Time forces our hand.”

  “But this one has to be my chef-d’oeuvre. My sales are slipping. I have to get out of a rut. Will you help me stretch the canvas?” He held up his cast. “I’ll get this off soon, but I have to start Sunday.”

  “You’ve been working on sketches with your left hand?”

  “No time for sketches. I have to finish it by the regatta in September to catch the best light.” He could see practical concerns swimming in Gustave’s eyes.

  “How big?”

  “The same as Moulin de la Galette.”

  “A Salon painting, then, that size?”

  “Don’t think it gives me any pleasure to be hung between Mary Magdalene and some togas.”

  Gustave looked troubled. “If it’s for the Salon, that’ll deplete our ranks again. Degas is as stubborn as an ox about his prohibition. Of course, you have every right to submit where you want.”

  Auguste saw agitation tighten his mouth. “What’s the matter?”

  “Degas and I had it out.”

  “You too?”

  “I told him a person’s work should be the only criterion for exhibiting with us, regardless of whether he showed in the Salon that year, and that he’s a zealot to think otherwise. He was once my mentor, yet I called him that.”

  “Mutual exclusiveness is his sacred principle.”

  “But that will crack us down the middle!” Gustave snapped. “He can’t see that it’s a matter of financial need. He called me an obstinate turncoat.”

  “Ha! You have to admit—the first is true.”

  “He’s determined to replace you and Monet and Sisley with his cronies. Raffaëlli, Zandomeneghi, Lepic, Legros, and others. They’re rank amateurs, though Forain has possibilities.”

  “And Pissarro?” Auguste asked.

  “Pissarro has no use for Degas because Edgar’s an anti-Semite. It’s Degas’ haughty attitude that infuriates me. He said to me, ‘You mean to say you let Monet and Renoir in your house?’ He’s gone sour. He bears the whole world a grudge. He doesn’t deliver on his promises either. God knows we only have a certain number of years to work, and he’s wasting them. Squandering his talent.”

  “You can’t shoulder the fate of our whole group, Gustave.”

  “But what’s to become of us? I get so miserable thinking about it that I get a pain right here.” He touched his chest. “If Bazille were here, he’d keep us together.”

  “If Bazille were here, it would still be the same,” Auguste said.

  “You’re wrong. Frédéric would be smart enough to maneuver Degas into a corner and skewer him, and then he’d be forced to concede.”

  “Frédéric was a brilliant painter,” Auguste said.

  “Do you remember his painting of two nude fishermen with a net?” Gustave asked. “Classical male nudes, but not gods, just fishermen in the woods.”

  “Of course.”

  “It had such a profound effect on me I’ll never forget it. It plugged the academy right between the eyes. I could kick myself for not buying it when they rejected it.” A tremolo threaded Gustave’s voice.

  “Don’t regret what’s past. You’ve done what you could. You still are.”

  “But if we’re not careful, we’re going to lose something precious.”

  That was it, of course. Not just the staunch camaraderie
that had supported them for a dozen years, but the force of their combined work. If they split, they’d be viewed as individual crackpots, not the harbingers of a bold new art. That possibility gnawed at him when he considered abandoning the Impressionist stroke, but that was too much to say to Gustave at the moment.

  “You’d think it would be unbreakable by now,” Auguste said, “but it’s more fragile than ever. And if I desert our next show—”

  “If you don’t show with us, you have a good reason. Claude too. I really don’t think he will. I had to hunt down his canvases and frame them myself for this year’s show, and it’s not going to be any easier next year. He gets discouraged in a way that scares me.”

  “You get discouraged in a way that scares me,” Auguste said.

  “It’s not for me that I’m grumbling. I know I’m second-rate. That doesn’t bother me. It’s for you and the others who’ve been together from the start. We can’t allow it to fall apart.”

  Gustave rubbed Mame with his foot. “But I have a plan, and when it’s carried out, you’ll be in the Louvre,” he said in a low voice.

  Auguste howled with sardonic laughter. “You’re dreaming.”

  Gustave gave him a steely look. “I’ve written out my will. I’m leaving my entire collection to the Musées Nationaux, with the stipulation that it will be displayed in the Musée du Luxembourg’s contemporary galleries for twenty years, and then moved to the Louvre. You’re going to arrange it.”

  “Ha! Assuming I haven’t starved first.” Auguste chortled, but the seriousness on Gustave’s face made him stop. In the last few years, Gustave’s parents and his younger brother had died. He’d hardly touched a brush all last year. “What does this mean, making out a will at your age?”

  Gustave lowered his voice. “I just don’t feel my generation of the family can expect a long life.”

  “Nonsense. You’re younger than I am.”

  “Will you or will you not be my executor?”

  “Only if you stretch my canvas.”

  “Tomorrow. At Maison Fournaise,” Gustave said. “You can’t take a thing that size on the train already stretched.”