ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 6, 1996 TAG: 9610050001
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 12 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: CARL HARTMAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
It's summer, afternoon on the Seine, near Paris. Genial young people finish an ample meal on a balcony under an awning: Overflowing bowls of fruit, plenty of wine, after-lunch aperitifs lard the tables.
From the look of it, they're ready to pair off in rowboats, where the men can show their muscles and the women can watch coquettishly, taking care that a gust of wind doesn't blow off their hats.
Get the picture? In 1881, the impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir got it even better, in his ``Luncheon of the Boating Party.''
Washington's Phillips Collection bought the painting for $125,000 in 1923 - it would fetch many millions now. Since Sept. 29 the Phillips has had on show an exhibition called ``Impressionists on the Seine,'' built around the Renoir, to celebrate the collection's 75th anniversary as America's first museum of modern art.
Sixty works by seven of the leading impressionists are included, with the Seine a prominent feature in each. Many are boating scenes. A few show industrial sites on the river. All show the impressionists' distinctive concern for light and mood.
The leaflet for visitors displays photos of six bearded, solemn-looking males: Renoir, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Eduard Manet and Gustave Caillebotte. There is one solemn, hatted and gloved female, Berthe Morisot.
The seven painted almost all the pictures along a short stretch of the river in what are now the French capital's western suburbs, places with names more poetic than today's landscapes: Chatou, Bougival, Argenteuil, Louveciennes.
``Luncheon of the Boating Party'' - 68 inches wide, 51 inches high - gets a wall to itself for its 14 figures. Most prominent among them, and appearing for the first time in Renoir's paintings, is Aline Charigot, who became Mme. Renoir and mother of the film director Jean Renoir.
The theme of the boating party had been on Renoir's mind for more than a decade, from the time he sat painting side-by-side with Monet at another riverside restaurant, the Grenouillere. The name means a frog pond, but in the slang of the time it also meant an easy place to pick up women.
Both those pictures are in the show.
The boating party backdrop, Restaurant Fournaise at Chatou, was a more high-toned place. The exhibit has a photo from Renoir's time, showing the balcony and awning.
Apparently Renoir painted there for months.
``I'm obliged to go on working on this wretched painting,'' he wrote to friends, ``because of a high-class cocotte who had the impudence to come to Chatou wanting to pose; that put me a fortnight behind schedule, and, in a word, today I've wiped her out.''
Aline apparently took her place in a flowered straw hat, lavishing her love on a small black dog.
Opposite sat Caillebotte, now one of the lesser known impressionists but important then because he was well off and financed some of the poorer ones. Recently he has become more familiar for his painting of a top-hatted bourgeois and a heavily draped lady marching along a rainy Paris street. It appears on T-shirts, umbrellas, coffee mugs and as a mural in a Washington restaurant.
That painting is not in the show, but the Phillips Collection shop has reproductions.
``Impressionists on the Seine'' is on view at the Phillips Collection through Feb. 9, 1997. Admission: $8 weekdays, $10 weekends.
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: The Phillips Collection bought Pierre-Auguste Renoir'sby CNBpriceless ``Luncheon of the Boating Party'' in 1923. color.