Luncheon of the Boating Party Read online

  “I know another place to paint that will give you pleasure. You’ve never painted from this high place before.”

  “Let me guess. From the railroad bridge? Do you want to get me killed?”

  “No.”

  “Then from the footbridge?”

  “No-o.” Her voice ascending flutelike lengthened the syllable into birdsong.

  “From the pumping station at Marly?”

  She teased him with a moment of coy silence. “When I finish, I’ll show you. All the times Edgar Degas has come here, I’ve never suggested it to him. Only to you.”

  “Ha! It would have been wasted on him. Edgar paints from his imagination in his stuffy studio and calls it a landscape. It’s supreme arrogance to think that what comes out of his brain is more valuable than what we see around us.”

  “Like this place.” She cupped his bloodied hand in hers in the bowl of soapy water. “You have long, thin fingers.”

  “And you have short, sweet ones.”

  “Why do you keep your fingernails longish?”

  “For protection. I could injure my fingertips and ruin my sense of touch. That would deprive me of a good deal of pleasure in life.” Her hands slid over his like minnows. The sensation made him close his eyes a moment. “It’s worth the stupid accident,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “Having you do this.”

  A pink flush crept up her neck to her cheeks that made him want to caress them. Or paint them, which was the same thing, really.

  “You have sand in your beard.”

  “Thank you for calling my measly little fringe a beard.”

  She dribbled water over it, threading her fingers through his hair. “It’s soft. I thought it would be scratchy.”

  “I made it that way on purpose, to give you pleasure.”

  “It’s nice the way you trim it in a narrow path along your jaw.”

  She patted his face and hands dry with a blue plaid dish towel and took him by the left wrist which sent a tremor up his arm. “Follow me.”

  He would skip after her like a young swain if he were able to. His hip ached and his thirty-nine years creaked in every joint as he entered the large restaurant and climbed the stairs to the terrace facing the river.

  She flung open her arms. “Paint from here. See what you can see? Both banks, upstream and down.” She turned the crank that rolled away the coral-and-gray-striped awning, and leaned out over the railing. “The floating exhalations from the grass, mingled with the damp scents from the river, filled the air with a soft languor, with a happy light, with an atmosphere of blessing. Guy de Maupassant wrote that. It’s lovely and true, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. A happy light,” he murmured.

  Paint from here. He was more than amused. He had been telling himself the same thing ever since Fournaise extended the balcony into a wider terrace three years ago, but he’d always postponed the idea. The perspective would be too tricky. He hadn’t known how to convey the sense that the terrace was part of a building and wasn’t floating in the sky.

  “Someday,” he said.

  “Why not now?”

  He didn’t want to admit he didn’t know how. “For now, I’m obliged to paint portraits of overbred society women in their fussy parlors.” She tipped her head, expecting a reason. “It pays.” He swept his arm over the tables and river. “This would be painting just for me. It might not pay a bean.”

  But what it offered him! Below the terrace, a dozen rowing skiffs tied to bank posts made graceful repeated shapes in the water, and a string of sailboats tied bow to stern formed a caravan from the slanted dock to the floating boat garage. On the eastern shore at Rueil, the white stone inn of La Mère Lefranc with its red-tiled roof caught the light in the afternoon, and on Sundays Parisians ate at tables in the small orchard. Downstream, the Giquel yacht works hung out over the water surrounded by boats, and a few scattered houses were nestled behind market gardens. Upriver, the smokestack of the carriage factory cast an ocher reflection and belched charcoal-colored smoke. Claude Monet would position a sail in front of it. Gustave would ignore the bank and paint from the odd perspective of the needle nose of a racing scull with rowers pulling at their oars. Pissarro, that old Communard, he’d make the smokestack central to the painting, symbol of the proletariat.

  And what would he do? How could he portray best this meeting place of city and country? Another riverscape with Parisians in boats? A mix of people eating and drinking? Dancing? Calling down to someone in a rowboat? He envisioned his friends gathered around the tables after a delicious lunch, flushed with pleasure, enjoying a beautiful day, showing what happens here every Sunday. Leisure. La vie moderne.

  But how? He sat down and crossed his legs. That was the more perplexing question, the underlying issue agitating him lately. Impressionist or traditional? It was all tied up with that other question—whether to withdraw completely from the Impressionist circle, continue to submit to the academic Salon and betray his friends, or to return to the Impressionist group he had helped to form. He still hated the term, a slam by that critic Louis Leroy who claimed they were only capable of sketchy impressions, but he loved his friends—Claude Monet, Gustave Caillebotte, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Paul Cézanne, and Berthe Morisot—and they’d all accepted the name.

  It’s just that he didn’t want the characteristic broken strokes of Impressionism to dictate his style in everything, particularly figures. Was he an Impressionist at all? If he deserted the cause permanently and painted in a more classical style, what would happen to their unity? The friendships that had kept them going? Who was he really betraying by turning out one society portrait after another? The group? Himself? Both?

  Père Alphonse Fournaise, Father Fournaise, a slightly smaller version of his well-fed son, came out onto the terrace wearing a blue mariner’s cap, holding a magazine and a baguette under his arm. He set out two tumblers of petit bleu, the wine most popular with rowers. “I’m sorry about your mishap.”

  Alphonsine dabbed at his cheek with the cloth. “It’s still oozing. Don’t forget what I said. A painting just for you.” She went downstairs.

  “Did you see Gustave sail by?” Père Fournaise asked.

  “Yes, I saw him. If I hadn’t, I’d have arrived on wheels and with a face that hadn’t been shaved by a cheese grater.”

  Fournaise unrolled the magazine, Le Voltaire. “He dropped this off for you two weeks ago. It has Zola’s review of this year’s Impressionist show, but it doesn’t mention you.”

  Auguste took the magazine. “That’s because I didn’t exhibit with them this year. Neither did Monet or Sisley or Cézanne.”

  “Why not?”

  “A rule Degas concocted. If we submit work to the official Salon we can’t exhibit in our Impressionist shows too. It was meant as a solidarity measure, but it’s having the opposite effect.”

  “The leaders breaking rank? You’re going to let the movement fall apart?”

  Auguste drummed his fingers on the table. “That’s not my intention. It’s just that only a handful of people buy works by painters not in the Salon, but eighty thousand beat down the doors every spring to snatch up works by any old imitator of the past with the cachet of being hung in the Salon.”

  “Well, read the article and see what Zola says.”

  He scanned the account of the group as an artistic force, but read more carefully the criticism that Impressionists were too often sloppy, too easily satisfied with work that was incomplete, illogical, and exaggerated.

  If one is too easily contented, if one sells sketches that are hardly dry, one loses the taste for works based on long and thoughtful preparation. The real misfortune is that no artist among the Impressionists has achieved powerfully and definitely the new formula which, scattered through their works, they all offer in glimpses.

  “Formula! Formula! Art has no formula. If it did, any Montmartre peddler would be painting pictures. He wants works based on long and though
tful preparation?” He smacked the table with his palm. “Then he’s forgotten my Bal au Moulin de la Galette. Six months’ work and two preliminary oil studies. You can’t lay down thirty heads on a canvas and make it look like a spontaneous moment without long and thoughtful preparation.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Does he think France has turned Protestant, valuing a work by how much the painter sweats in creating it? If an Impressionist settles for a sketch, it’s because a sketch serves his particular purpose.”

  This was souring a beautiful day. He recrossed his legs and read on.

  They are all forerunners. The man of genius has not yet arisen. We can see what they intend, and find them right, but we seek in vain the masterpiece that is to lay down the formula. All remain unequal to their self-appointed task. That is why, despite their struggle, they have not reached their goal; they remain inferior to what they undertake; they stammer without being able to find words.

  A punch in the stomach. He tossed the magazine onto the table. “I thought Émile was our friend.”

  “Maybe he still is. Degas was here last Sunday and thought Zola was just challenging the group. Throwing down the gauntlet.”

  “Degas sees only what he wants to see. There have been signs of Zola’s change of opinion before this.”

  So what was he to do? Let his friends answer the charge themselves? He had enough roiling in his gut without this. His direction. That is, his two directions. A country painter of loosely brushed landscapes, or a city painter of figures in the classical tradition. He loved aspects of each equally. One road might well lead him back to poverty, the other to stagnation.

  Auguste looked down through the terrace ironwork. Brawny young Alphonse, the opposite of himself, was wheeling the cycle on its hind wheels. “I think I can fix it,” Alphonse said.

  “I’d be much obliged. While you’re at it, I have a busted color box.”

  Louise called up the stairs and Fournaise went down. Auguste tipped his chair back against the railing and stared at the empty table. If the rant had been written by Leroy or Wolff or any of the usual critics, he’d toss it off as the same old whine. But Émile Zola. Zola, who had defended the group against old-school judgment-mongers. From him, this was the cruelest cut of all.

  Works based on long and thoughtful preparation. Like Bal au Moulin de la Galette, his painting of the open-air dance hall in Montmartre. The shadows of two windmills, the tinny music, dust rising from dancing feet, the swirl of muslin dresses, the laughter of his friends, the clink of glasses touching, the lively taste of piccolo from the vineyard a block away, the sweet, flaky wine-soaked galettes, the fragrance of iris and lavender being ground in a windmill for the perfumers of Paris, the breeze lifting a woman’s hair to reveal a graceful neck, dappled light filtered through acacias caressing a cheek, being in love, Margot—yes, all of it pulsing again, encore.

  An encore. What Zola wanted was just what he needed to do—the major work he’d imagined here for years, la vie moderne at Chatou, as Moulin had been la vie moderne at Montmartre. An encore to Moulin, but this had to surpass Moulin. If he wasn’t going to exhibit with the Impressionists again, he could at least support them by answering Zola’s charge with a painting designed to astonish. Figures, landscape, genre subject—all in one. Throw in a still life too. Not just a few figures. A dozen or more, at closer range this time. If he were to abandon Impressionism eventually, he wanted to go out with a bang. But if he were to follow his instinct, he would use a combination of styles. It would be an experiment. The faces modeled with more classical techniques, one hue blending seamlessly into another to create shape, but the landscape and still life in looser, distinct strokes. Every figure, every feature a small painting in and of itself. Ideas came so fast he knew it was the right time to do it. “The genius has not yet arisen. Zut! Zola will eat his words.”

  He sat up straighter. This could turn the tide for him. It could reverse the slippage in sales. Dollfus hadn’t bought anything for four years, Duret and Rivière for three, Murer for two. He’d sold nothing to Ephrussi, Deudon, and Chocquet for more than a year. Why?

  Because he hadn’t been progressing. The technical challenge of this painting would force him to move ahead. But how was he to achieve the perspective? Position the figures? Anchor the terrace? Convey the river below? He read the paragraph again. They remain inferior to what they undertake. His arm throbbed, his palm burned. This would be the fight of his life.

  The idea was so ambitious that if he couldn’t turn out a masterpiece on par with Moulin, critics would slice it to shreds. If it only came close it would be ridiculed for its ambivalence of styles or its faulty composition. His sales would drop even more, his career would go backward. He’d be plunged into the poverty of a few years ago. His sense of worth as a painter would crack and he would be afraid to try any other style. So, what now? Dive or stagnate?

  He had enjoyed a flurry of success, a few years of financial well-being. He’d bought the Peugeot, sailed with Gustave Caillebotte to the coast, developed a few collectors, but his situation today was uncertain.

  How could he pay a dozen models even at the lowest rate of ten francs each per session? What would the work require? Ten sessions, at least. That alone would eat up what was left from Bérard’s commission. He would have to rent the terrace if he expected Fournaise to close it off from customers. He’d need a room here to live in and keep the painting in. And the cost of supplies for so large a canvas—probably two or three hundred francs. The commissions he’d have to decline would be a huge loss, and those requests would be snapped up by other painters. No. It was impossible. Claude painting what he pleased without an eye to commissions had always struck him as giddy insanity. That he couldn’t do. He had his Paris studio rent to pay. It was foolish to consider it.

  Alphonsine brought up a plate of green beans, fried potatoes, and grenouilles, frog legs sautéed with garlic and parsley, a common dish here because frogs in marshy areas jumped right into your hand. She leaned forward with her elbow on the railing looking at the river. Her breasts hung loosely under her linen blouse and her light brown curls, drying now, moved in the breeze. Her freshness made him feel old. If he was ever going to do this painting, it had to be now.

  Fournaise came up with a plate for himself. “You know, Gustave will have stiff competition this year in the sailing regatta. I’ve seen a new racing sloop pass by which looked like a Series Four. Fast as a swallow.”

  “It should be an exciting race. You’ll make piles of money from the crowd here. When is it?”

  “The second Sunday in September. The week after our own Fêtes Nautiques.”

  Fournaise couldn’t have a dozen models and a big painting occupying the terrace during his Fêtes Nautiques, the annual festival of rowing and jousting championships. It would prevent him from filling every corner of his restaurant and grounds with customers. The terrace was the prime viewing spot for the races.

  He would just have to finish it by then. But the portrait of Madame Charpentier and her children with only three figures and a hound dog had taken him more than forty sittings. What he had in mind was so complex that he wasn’t sure he could make it work at all, much less under time constraints. It wasn’t just the Fêtes. Autumn would bring a change of light.

  He took a pencil and his small sketch pad from his pocket and scribbled with his left hand. Alphonsine stretched out her neck to watch. “Names?”

  “Friends who might be willing to pose.”

  The wild man Paul Lhôte would, for sure, and if he did, so would Pierre Lestringuèz, his prophet-of-doom protector. Gustave Caillebotte, if he could get him away from the Iris, the qualifying races, and his own painting. He would give Gustave a prominent spot in the composition. All that Gustave had done for the group over the years, renting their exhibit space, paying for advertising, hanging the exhibitions, covering Monet’s and Pissarro’s rent so many times, buying their paintings when they didn’t have a sou for a bow
l of soup—this would be a recognition of that. It would tell France how important Caillebotte was to the movement.

  Who else? Jeanne. With her last portrait, he’d felt he was approaching what he was capable of doing. It was love that did it. He needed to be in love with someone who loved him back, so he would see everything through the atmosphere of happiness. Love always brought about his best work, and this was too big a risk not to be his best. If Jeanne wasn’t performing on Sundays, if she was over her pique about his last painting of her, if he could make her see this new one as a valuable means of promotion for her, she might consent, but she’d charge him through the nose—the bigger the image, the more per sitting.

  He finished the meal. “What would you think if I painted right here?”

  Alphonsine sprang upright.

  “Anytime. You know that,” Fournaise said.

  “I mean a large painting. Lots of people. After one of Louise’s savory luncheons. People enjoying themselves full tilt.”

  Fournaise pushed out his bottom lip. “How long would it take?”

  He had to get him to agree before he saw what an intrusion it would be.

  “It depends on how often I can get models to come.”

  “It would make La Maison Fournaise famous,” Alphonsine said.

  “Why don’t you just do the setting here,” Fournaise asked, “and add the people in your studio?”

  “I can’t. I have two rules for myself, and I’ve rarely broken them. Always paint from life, and don’t do anything I don’t enjoy. I have to paint it where they’ll be living what I paint. Parisians at leisure on the river. The railroad bridge to show how they got here. The light and the feel, right here. I’ll rent the space, and a room in your hotel.”

  “How much space?” Fournaise sectioned off one table at the far end.

  “The whole terrace. I can’t have people carousing up here while I work. I’ll need it during the week too, not just on Sundays.”

  Fournaise planted his feet wide. His bottom lids tightened. The canny entrepreneur, thinking. In order to build a restaurant, a hotel, a fleet of pleasure boats, a big annual fête, acquire a steam touring launch, and buy up most of the upper island, he’d had to consider all angles of a proposition.