Le déjeuner des canotiers is a painting by French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. It has another name in English which is called Luncheon of the Boating Party.
The painting depicts a group of Renoir’s friends relaxing on a balcony at the Maison Fournaise along the Seine river in Chatou, France.
Aline Charigot, Renoir’s future wife, who was playing a small dog in the front.
Charles Ephrussi, who is a wealthy amateur art historian, collector and the editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, wore a top hap in the background. The younger man to whom Ephrussi appears to be speaking, more casually attired in a brown coat and cap, he may be Jules Laforgue, Ephrussi’s personal secretary and also a poet and critic.
Actress Ellen Andée drunk from a glass in the center of the composition. Seated across from her is Baron Raoul Barbier.
Placed within but peripheral to the party are the proprietor’s daughter Louise-Alphonsine Fournaise and her brother, Alphonse Fournaise, Jr., both sporting traditional straw boaters and appearing to the left side of the image. Alphonsine is the smiling woman leaning on the railing; Alphonse, who was responsible for the boat rental, is the leftmost figure.
Also wearing boaters are figures appearing to be Renoir’s close friends Eugéne Pierre Lestringez and Paul Lhote, who is an artist. Renoir depicts them flirting with the actress Jeanne Samary in the upper righthand corner of the painting.
In the right foreground, Gustave Caillebotte wears a white boater’s shirt and flat-topped straw boaters hat as he sits backwards in his chair next to actress Angéle Legault and journalist Adrien Maggiolo. An art patron, painter, and important figure in the impressionist circle, Caillebotte was also an avid boatman and drew on that subject for several works.
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