Luncheon of the Boating Party

by Susan Vreeland

  His search for the perfect composition, the perfect stroke, the perfect colors, model, woman—did he dare think he had found them? In the morning, or in some distant morning, would he awake and find it had been a night dream that had teased him into taking an illusion for reality?

  Could he ever be as good again as he was this moment? As full of hope? If he wanted to say yes, and mean it, he would have to change. With this painting, he had carried Impressionism as far as he could. At least with figures. The recognition descended as his eyes filled. He had created a revolution that left him out.

  The crowd was abuzz, matching the figures in the painting with the models who reveled in their images. Jeanne’s husband looked miffed. He was outside the frame. Auguste chortled. What did he expect?

  “Who’s the mystery man in the center looking at me?” Ellen asked.

  “Everyman, chérie.” He watched her expressive face show her delight. “A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When you make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.”

  “What a wonderful meal those people must have just eaten,” Aline murmured.

  “It’s more important than a pleasant lunch, Aline,” Alphonsine said in a pinched tone. “It’s the evidence of the healing of France, and Maison Fournaise has played a part as much as Emélie Bécat singing ‘Alsace and Lorraine.’” She turned to him. “It sends out a blessedness because we’re in a state of grace on that piece of cloth.”

  It was dear of her to think that, but to his mind, the moment any painter becomes conscious of a message, the work loses its seductive power to unveil any more discoveries. Still, if grace involved love and good deeds, she was right to feel its blessings.

  “True indeed, Alphonsine,” Jules said, nodding thoughtfully. “The light of history is glancing off our shoulders.”

  “It’s terribly bourgeois, though,” Charles remarked.

  “Look again,” Jules said. “These aren’t safely married couples repeopling France with children. They’re not at church on Sunday. They are, we are the fringe element that makes the bourgeoisie nervous. We’re enjoying ourselves too much.”

  Charles threaded his fingers through his beard in a contemplative way. “Some flâneur of the future will look at our faces, hats, and clothes and will deduce our relationships, our occupations, our domestic lives.”

  “They’ll have a great deal of guessing to do,” Jules said. “But what doesn’t take any guessing is Auguste’s own identity in all of us. That’s where genius lies, in the flashes of revelation that go from the painter through the subject to the viewer.”

  A crewman of Le Palais weaved his way toward Auguste. “Nice painting you’ve got there.”

  “Thank you kindly.”

  “Some fine-looking women. You’ve probably laid every one of them. How long did it take you? To paint, I mean.”

  “Twenty years.”

  Gustave snorted. Others laughed.

  “It’s true!” His voice rose. “I’ve been working toward it for that long.”

  The man swayed. “You’ve got a lot of paint on it. How much did that cost you?”

  “A couple hundred francs.”

  The man put his face right into his. Auguste backed away. The man reeked of wine. “You expect to get that much out of it, then? How much do you get?”

  “Plenty.” Auguste puffed out air back to him. “I paint pornography in the brothels, so I get as much as I want. My success there is so big it’s astounding.”

  The man’s friends hooted and he staggered off.

  Charles stepped up alongside him. “I want to warn you that someone you know is coming to see the painting today.”

  “Not another one like that duffer.”

  “Someone important.”

  Auguste groaned. “Zola?”

  “Guess again.”

  “Not Degas, I hope.” He didn’t want to have to spar with that porcupine.

  “If you take your eyes off your painting for a minute, you can see for yourself.”

  There in the back of the crowd was Paul Durand-Ruel.

  “You sure aren’t one for giving a man much of a warning. How did he know to come today?”

  “I told him.” Smugness seeped through Charles’s voice.

  “But it’s not finished.”

  Durand-Ruel made his way through the crowd and shook his hand.

  “Astonishing.”

  “It’s not finished.”

  Auguste introduced him to everyone. They acted like excited children anticipating the praise of a schoolmaster.

  “Keep in mind that I’m not finished.”

  “Radiant,” Durand-Ruel said. “These women could not have been painted by anyone else. They have that roguish charm that only you can give to women.”

  “I only paint what they give me.”

  “The sly, soft eyes of this one tipping her head coquettishly, the archness of her smile. And the pert little nose of that one, her petulance, absorbed in her dog but knowing that Gustave is adoring her. The feline charm of this one looking through the glass. And the black gloves to this one’s ears, forcing us to speculate what she doesn’t want to hear.”

  “You must agree that the composition is brilliant,” Charles said, his words tumbling out. “Look at the woman holding the dog, how her shoulder and upper arm connect with the boatman’s hand so the line of both their arms enclose the group on the left, and the standing man’s arm and Gustave’s back enclose it on the right.”

  “Yes, I see,” Durand-Ruel said.

  “And Gustave’s hand lines up with Angèle’s, the woman looking at him,” Charles said. “And the two hands on the chair on the right, the titillation of that.”

  “Not to mention the moments of bravura painting,” Durand-Ruel said. “The luscious still life. The face through a glass is far lovelier than Vermeer’s attempt. The young woman loving her little dog—you’re quoting Fragonard there. And the languor of the one leaning on the railing is pure Ingres. You’ve given the masters a rebirth in Impressionist style and subject.”

  Ah, good. His debt to the painters he loved was evident. His whole body released its grip.

  “Marvelous, the stories you hint at in the interactions,” Durand-Ruel said.

  “There is no story. It’s only a moment.”

  “With this, the modern genre painting has fully eclipsed history painting, and art will never be the same again,” Durand-Ruel said. “You come to me before you offer it to anyone else.”

  “It’s not finished.”

  “It will be a devil to sell, though.”

  Auguste bristled. “Why, after what you’ve just said?”

  Durand-Ruel raised one eyebrow. “I might love it too much to let it go.”

  A turbulence in his chest made him put his hand there. He turned away a moment so the stinging behind his eyes wouldn’t brim over.

  A second later he turned right back. “I want it exhibited, Paul, not just hanging in your dining room for a dozen people to see. I want thousands to see it.”

  “Hundreds of thousands will. They’ll come great distances to see it.”

  Aline and Ellen and Angèle and Jeanne had all arranged themselves in a row, with Alphonsine in the middle, their arms linked, their faces beaming. A chorus line. He was overcome.

  “Toutes mes chères femmes.” The words came out in a higher pitch than normal. All his dear women, each of them brave in her own way.

  “What do you want people to see when they look at this painting in years to come?” Durand-Ruel asked.

  “The goodness of life.”

  Or, he could have said the painting of love, and the love of painting. It amounted to the same thing.

  Yet, to him, it seemed an image of all things that he was eventually going to give up, maybe sooner than he had thought. His insouciance, the bohemian life, Impressionism. The painting was a directive proclaiming new challenges ahead.

  There was no remaining still, in art
or in life.

  Alphonsine felt a chill as she watched her father and brother carry the painting inside. For some moments, she was adrift in a haze of noise and movement. She tried to steady herself by watching yellow leaves fall into the river. Soon the trees would be bare skeletons. Eventually Auguste’s friends, her friends, drifted upstairs to the terrace, feeling some ownership, she supposed. It was a charmed circle no one outside could enter or understand, not even this dealer who would own the canvas but not their thoughts.

  For them, the memory would be more full and vivid than the weeks themselves had been when they had been living them, swept up in the swirl of the process too intensely to reflect on it. Only upon the completion of the painting, and hearing people speak about it, could they comprehend that they had been a piece of something more complex and more far-reaching than their own single parts in it. It humbled her at the same time as it thrilled her.

  Daylight stole away. Dusk in autumn came subtly, but this one was all too sharp to her. What had blossomed here one magical summer would be no more. A thing exists, and then it does not, and a new thing is born. His hands became the work and the work became them, all the models together. But when the painting would go beyond Chatou, it would become a different thing, a piece of human history, no longer only theirs. She would feel the void. Auguste wouldn’t. His thoughts were already weighty with the next.

  The great moment of her life was almost over. Her contribution would go unrecognized, and she would have the decades ahead to relive the beautiful liquid days when Pierre-Auguste Renoir created a masterpiece on her terrace.

  She went upstairs to be with them one last time. Gold and silver lights winked on in Rueil and on boats still on the river. The time for leaving approached. There were sweet words. Embraces. Goodbyes. She knew the finality of them. Auguste said he would always be indebted to her. Beyond that, his moist, penetrating eyes said what he couldn’t put in words.

  Her moment of keenest sorrow sucked the breath out of her—Aline and Auguste walking across the bridge away from Chatou, and Aline, with little understanding of its importance, carrying Auguste’s color box that had once been Bazille’s.

  She gripped the railing and felt an arm reach around her and draw her to his side.

  Papa.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Incandescence

  Another man is lost to me, the fifth in my life, if I’m to count Louis, Alexander, Gustave, and Maurice. The fifth, most dear, most enduring. Auguste died yesterday.

  At his villa in Cagnes-sur-Mer, the article in Excelsior said, the third of December 1919, a year after the armistice. I’ve just read again, here by the river, how three months ago his friends carried him in a chair through the Louvre, opened just for him, to see for the last time Veronese and Watteau and Delacroix, Titian, Boucher, Fragonard, Rubens, and Ingres, his favorites returned safely from their wartime hiding places.

  Oh, his last words. Apparently his maid had gathered wild anemones on the hillside above the Mediterranean Sea, and for several hours he lost himself in the mysteries of painting flowers, and forgot his pain. Then he motioned for someone to take his brush, and murmured, “I think I’m beginning to understand something about it.”

  For nearly forty years, knowing that he was in the world painting what he loved had to be enough. Mine was a distant love, not as sensuous as Héloïse longing for Abelard for fifteen years, but as steady. She and I share one thing—the helplessness of desire. Like her, I can send my love To him who is specially hers, from she who is singularly his, even though the outward manifestation of it existed only briefly. Perhaps now that he is beyond the breach, this love stretching into the unknown will be easier for me in the years I have left.

  He’ll be buried in Essoyes, Champagne, alongside her. Aline, I mean. It had taken him ten years and the birth of two of his three sons before he made his relationship public and married her. Gustave had told me that he’d kept her a secret until he was ready to settle down, and she had been content with that. I have a feeling from the way she applied herself to learning P-A-L-E-T-T-E that she used that time wisely.

  I went to Durand-Ruel’s gallery once to try to see the painting, and learned that their sons Pierre and Jean were both seriously wounded in the Great War, another cataclysm of cruelty, and Aline, ill herself, had undertaken the arduous journey from one son’s hospital in the southwest to the other’s in the northeast to plead with the doctors not to amputate Jean’s leg. What she saw must have devastated her. When Jean was out of danger, she went home and collapsed, passing away a few days later with three more years of war to go.

  As soon as the armistice was signed and train service began again, I went to Les Collettes, Auguste’s villa in the South, my need to see him pulsing as strong as ever. I won’t say he cried, but his eyes pooled when he saw me. He was more emaciated than ever, the hollows of his cheeks were deeper, and his hands and legs were paralyzed. It was a shock I tried not to show.

  He was surrounded by paintings affirming that beauty was still allin-all to him. I recognized Aline in one, gray-haired, motherly, stout under a flowing dress, her hand cupped under the belly of a newborn puppy. He said only two things about her, that mercifully she had died without knowing it, and that she had given him peace and time to think. I was glad of both. Then he added, almost as an apology to me, that all currents bring a person to a final safe place, and that he was right to rely on what happened naturally.

  His nurse and his cook carried him in a wicker armchair across a rough path overhung with bougainvillea to a small studio. “If I had to choose between walking and painting, I would much rather paint,” he said.

  Completely made of glass and warmed by an oil stove, the room was surrounded by bare olive trees that storms and age had made into weirdly shaped skeletons.

  In a feeble voice, he said, “I can roast my rheumatism in the sun here, and feel like I am painting en plein air.” He let out a long, fluttering sigh. “The light here opens my eyes to eternal things. In the spring, the orange trees, roses, and wisteria will all be blooming. My earthly paradise.”

  I prayed that he would live to see it.

  An unfinished canvas of gold and white chrysanthemums in a green ceramic vase was nailed to a mechanism that could roll it up and down so the part he was working on would be within reach. I watched in agony as his nurse slid a brush between his index and middle fingers, and cushioned it with a cotton pad against the hollow of his palm, which was bound to keep down the swelling.

  I ached for him, gaunt and crippled as he was, in his gray felt carpet slippers, as intensely as when he was young and wiry. I held his palette, but what I wanted was to touch his hands, the thumbs permanently bent against the palms, the frozen fingers twisted toward his wrist as weirdly as the olive tree branches, the knobs of knuckles stretching the skin. I yearned to cradle them in my palms. I loved his hands, so small and brittle.

  He must have guessed. After painting awhile, he let me change the brush his nurse had inserted. His skin was as thin as parchment. I was afraid I would tear it, like the bandaged place on his wrist had torn. Slowly I slid one brush out between his rigid fingers and worked the other one in.

  Once in place, he pointed with the brush to a ladybug resting on a white petal. A high, soft sound, like a bird’s sigh at twilight, issued from the space between his thin lips. “Out of the whole world where he could have flown, he came here so I could paint him. That’s God.”

  He reached toward the canvas slowly and placed a red dot on a petal, unerringly, without a support.

  “There, now. That little bug belongs to me. You see, one doesn’t need a hand in order to paint.”

  He groaned, trying to shift in his chair. “Why did they have to make a thin man’s sit-bones so pointed?”

  The heads of the chrysanthemums bent forward, tired, but there was adoration for them in his eyes. Each stroke applied with pain-racked fingers showed his intoxication with those blooms, his awe at the miracle of their bei
ng. In his desire overcoming pain in the service of beauty, he was radiant.

  “A painter should be dead if he can’t paint,” he said.

  That led us to speak of Gustave, how he had withdrawn from the Paris art world after his move to Petit Gennevilliers, how he designed racing yachts and had owned ten boats at one time or another, and how he had won nearly every race he entered at Argenteuil and on the coast at Le Havre and Trouville. I told Auguste that he had become Conseilleur Municipal of Petit Gennevilliers. Whenever the town needed streetlights, paving, or uniforms for the fire department, he paid out of his own pocket. Easier that way, he had told me.

  “That sounds just like him. Awful that he died just before Durand-Ruel’s big show of his work. I think he retreated intentionally from the attention.”

  “I went to it,” I was quick to say. “How beautifully he painted périssoires on water.”

  “He made one important mistake in his life. Undervaluing his own work. He didn’t include a single painting of his own in his legacy to the Louvre. I insisted that one be added.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one of workmen in bare torsos scraping a parquet floor.”

  “Ah, yes. I understood then, seeing it, why you had warned me.”

  A thought clouded his eyes then. “I had to fight to have his collection accepted by the Louvre. They took barely more than half of it,” he said, something between pain and fury in his voice. Apparently he hadn’t made peace with some things.

  Nor had I. “There was a woman who lived in a cottage on his property, a housekeeper, perhaps,” I said. “Maybe he did need a woman after all.”

  Auguste lifted a shoulder in a minute shrug.

  I didn’t tell him that every year on All Souls’ Day, I laid roses on Gustave’s grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Roses. An idea. Fidelity. Like Héloïse after all.

  We shared what we knew about the others. Raoul did become a theater critic. Jules moved to Germany and then to England where he married, returned to Paris and died a few months later, at twenty-seven.