Luncheon of the Boating Party

The subtractive test, figure by figure. Aline Charigot with the dog cannot go: she opens the picture at the left, and the hands lifting the dog are its nearest point of tenderness. The young Fournaise at the railing holds the left edge against the diagonal. The still life cannot go, because the light on glass and cloth sets the whole key. Caillebotte astride his chair closes the right corner, and the woman leaning toward him turns the group back in. Ellen Andrée drinking at the centre is the pivot. Further back the test gives: Ephrussi and his companion, or one of the heads at the back right, could be taken out and the picture would hold with fewer guests. The crowding is the subject, so most figures are required as a mass, not all as persons. The awning is required: it encloses the company and colours the light.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Something can be stated, and it holds. In the leisure of the Paris outskirts, people of different classes met on equal terms for an afternoon: a boatman in a singlet, a banker and collector in a top hat, actresses, a seamstress, a painter of means and the proprietor’s children share one table and one light. The meeting is shown as conversation and glance, not as a ceremony of rank, and the image discloses that social fact as fully as words could. Held below the gate because so much of the picture is a state of feeling, ease, appetite, flirtation, the warmth of the hour, and a state ranks below a meaning. The terms of the mixing, who pays, who serves, who goes home to what, stay outside the frame. The disclosure is real and comes to rest in a mood.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Elevation of one kind, warm beauty, recurring across the whole field without rising to grandeur. It comes in the still life at the front left, bottles, half-full glasses, grapes and the white of the cloth caught in broken touches; in the light filtered through the striped awning, tinting faces and shirts; in the white singlets of the men at left and right, blue and violet in their shadows; in the river and sails glimpsed through the leaves, a breath of distance in a crowded room; and in Aline’s face over the dog, the most tender passage of all. The frequency is high: almost every square of the canvas is a pleasure. The height is moderate. There is no terror, no transport by scale and no sense of the vast. The register is charm, sustained.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Myth is evoked and not built. Behind the picture stand the feast as the image of human fellowship, the long tables of Veronese and the wedding feast; Watteau’s companies of lovers at ease out of doors, and with them the embarkation for the island of love, since these diners are boatmen, on an island, by the water; and the garden of love, pairs forming under a canopy. A viewer can find each of these. None bears the composition. No pair is cast as lovers in a story, the island is not staged as Cythera, and the table is a lunch, not a communion. The particulars stay wholly particular: a restaurant at Chatou, its proprietor’s children, the painter’s friends. The archetype is atmosphere, the very inflation the gate is set against, and that holds the axis lowest of the twelve, level with The Encompassed.

Score: 7.0 / 10

The inheritance: Manet’s large groups of modern life; the Impressionist subject of leisure on the Seine, which Monet and Renoir had painted side by side at La Grenouillère in 1869; and Renoir’s own Bal du moulin de la Galette of 1876, which had already set a crowd of friends in dappled light at the scale of a Salon picture. The departure here is one of degree. The crowd is drawn closer, the figures are firmer, the still life is set as an anchor at the front, and the contour begins to reassert itself in the near heads, the first sign of the turn that took the painter to Italy and to Ingres. That turn is real, but the pictures after this one make it. The canvas was large and costly in sittings, but its subject and manner were proven. A wager on a proven path is not a swerve.

Score: 7.2 / 10

Substitute a different form and much of what the picture knows goes. Its knowledge is the gathering as an experience, and three choices make it. Where the viewer sits: the table runs in from the lower edge, the still life is nearest, and Caillebotte’s chair is turned toward the viewer’s side, so the viewer is placed at the table as one more guest. The crowding: overlapping figures make the press of a full balcony, where a frieze, or groups with air between them, would show a party from outside. The touch: one feathered handling binds faces, glass, cloth and leaves, so the light is shared and the company with it. Held below the top because much of this would survive a smaller canvas or another arrangement, and because the group at the back right is so compressed that the form there stores figures rather than knowing anything with them.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Evidence over promise: about 145 years of steady return, chiefly of three kinds. Identity: who is who, and how sure the traditional names are, especially at the back right and beside the top hat. Biography: Aline Charigot, later the painter’s wife, at the front with the dog, and a whole exhibition built on the friends in the picture. Glance: who looks at whom, the woman at the railing looking down at the man beside her, a man bending toward his neighbour, a woman drinking while the man beside her looks away. These cross-currents reward slow looking, and return does yield more pairs and motives. Held here because the open questions concern the circle and the moment more than the meaning. The picture has drawn no sustained argument about what it discloses. The well is pleasant and fairly shallow: re-entered often, rarely deepened.

Score: 7.6 / 10

On view for about 145 years, so force and reach are scored together, in French painting about 1880. The intrinsic force is a summation, not a reorganisation: Impressionist light carried into the large composition of many figures, with a new firmness of form, proving that the movement could hold a group of Salon scale without losing its touch. That achievement lies within possibilities Manet and the Moulin de la Galette had opened. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide as image and narrow as consequence. It became one of the most reproduced paintings of its century and the emblem of a museum, and it has been quoted in film, where the painter in Amélie (2001) copies it year after year. Painting after 1881 went where Cézanne, Seurat and Gauguin took it, and this picture redirected little of that. Presence is not pressure.

Score: 7.5 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 145 years, within the span of seventy years to two centuries. Form: the composition stands whole, one canvas, with no part recorded as lost or replaced. Presence: continuous, in an American private collection opened to the public, and on view in Washington for a century, among the widest of any painting of its century; presence earns at most a tenth. Fabric: oil on canvas, with no restoration recorded against it and none charged. Against it, the surface is fixed to its moment by design: the boaters’ singlets, straw hats, bustles and river leisure of 1880 are its subject. The picture has outlived that moment as an image of leisure as such, and the figure stands a tenth below the widest-presence mark for the span, for the period surface.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged as command of oil on a canvas about 1.3 by 1.76 metres, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing in places. The still life is a virtuoso passage: glass, wine, fruit and white cloth made of separate touches that resolve at a distance. Light through a striped awning is held consistently across the whole company. Flesh is modelled in warm and cool colour without dark shadow. The groups interlock so that glances carry across the table. Two handlings are reconciled in one surface, the firmer drawing of the near heads and the feathered foliage and river. The costs are charged. The tabletop tilts up and the right side of the balcony is hard to stand in; the back right is crowded into a pile of heads; some faces settle into the painter’s sweet type rather than portraits. Command is high, realisation uneven at the back.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the bottles and grapes at the front left, and the sails on the river beyond the railing. They obey one law. Everything is made of light laid as coloured touch, and nothing is outlined against its ground except where the near heads begin to firm. Glass, flesh, cloth, leaves and water are one substance under one afternoon. The social law is one too: every figure, banker or boatman, is painted with the same affection and placed by the light, not by rank. Two things hold the axis lower. A second law intrudes in the firmer contours of the near heads, which sit slightly apart from the dissolved handling of the far group. And the space obeys two systems, the tilted table and the receding railing, which do not fully agree. The range is a balcony, a meal and a river.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The orders held: society, in a company that mixes classes; labour, in the proprietor’s children, who are also serving, and in the boatmen, whose sport is their trade’s leisure face; commerce, in a restaurant; friendship and courtship, in the pairs; the art world, in a collector, a painter-patron and the painter’s circle; appetite, at the table; nature, in river, leaves and sky. They are integrated: the table and the light place every one of them in a single afternoon. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, level with The Archetypal Deep, is what is absent: no state, no history, ten years after the Commune and nothing of it shown, no sacred order, no family as family, and no consciousness beyond glance and mood. The figure describes a form whose subject is an afternoon.

Score: 7.0 / 10