Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise (The Rowers’ Lunch)

At the Maison Fournaise on the Seine at Chatou, where Renoir and his friends gathered in the 1870s, lunch was served on a shaded balcony over the water. Painted in 1875, Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise sets the smiling patrons at their long table, the river sparkling through the railings behind them in patches of clean broken colour. The picture is the brilliant companion to Renoir’s slightly later and larger Déjeuner of the same riverside terrace, here caught in a narrower, more intimate slice of the same sunshine and joie de vivre at the exact centre of the Impressionist riverbank. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.