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Luncheon of the Boating Party |
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Monday, 21 January 2008 |
By Susan Vreeland
Viking/Penguin, 2007: 430p, hardcover,
Village Voice price €25,
Your French News price €24
Susan Vreeland has carved a
niche for herself writing fiction
about art and artists. Her ‘Girl in
Hyacinth Blue’, a history of a “lost”
Vermeer and its successive owners,
was a bestseller. Her latest novel is
a bold, bright account of the
making of Auguste Renoir’s Le
Repas des canotiers and the
intertwined lives of its fourteen
models, male and female.
Deftly avoiding the
bloodlessness that weakens much
fiction grounded in historical
research, Vreeland unfolds the story
from the viewpoint of the artist and seven of his sitters, all of
them awash with emotions on the eight consecutive Sundays
on which the picture is painted on the terrace of a restaurant
overlooking the banks of the Seine a few miles downstream
from Paris. Renoir, who enters the scene on a steam bicycle, is
determined to paint the masterpiece that will silence the critics
who claim he lacks genius. But time and money – he foots the
bill for the models, the meals, and his pigments – are running
short.
The actors of this iconic scene of Impressionist art have
their own passionate involvements and, between the amorous
triangles formed and their determination to enjoy life to the full
after the horrors of the Paris Commune and the Franco-
Prussian War, they prove to be anything but docile sitters.
“I make it a rule never to paint except out of pleasure,” says
Renoir in the novel, and clearly the party he immortalized in
the summer of 1880 was, for all the difficulties, financial and
sentimental, that beset it, a celebration of the joys of farniente,
friendship, flirtation, and wine. Susan Vreeland is good at
conjuring up the euphoria that speeds a master’s brush when he
is at the top of his form and in love with the bounties of the
physical world. Her prose takes on a bubbly, delightfully lightheaded
quality when she writes about the artist relishing the
sight of a girl eating a cherry and translating his pleasure at her
pleasure into paint. “Art is love made visible,” Renoir is
reported to have declared. Vreeland shows us how art and
desire also weave their magic in words.
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