Oarsmen at Chatou

The boating resorts on the Seine above Paris were among Renoir’s favorite settings in the 1870s, and Chatou — with its riverside inn and hireable skiffs — drew him back several times. Oarsmen at Chatou, painted in 1879, belongs to the cycle of leisure scenes out of which the great Luncheon of the Boating Party grew two years afterward. In it Renoir celebrated the pastime that best defined the new modernity of the river in the Impressionist decade, a picture of ease and watery light in which the young boatmen with their oars embody the sunlit sociability of the waterside. The canvas entered the National Gallery of Art in 1951.