Luncheon of the Boating Party
"The big Renoir deal has gone through with Durand-Ruel and the Phillips Memorial Gallery is to be the possessor of one of the greatest paintings in the world...Its fame is tremendous and people will travel thousands of miles to our house to see it...Such a picture creates a sensation wherever it goes."
—Duncan Phillips, 1923
Pierre Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880-81
The Luncheon of the Boating Party by Pierre-Auguste Renoir remains the best known and most popular work of art at The Phillips Collection, just as Duncan Phillips imagined it would be when he bought it in 1923. The painting captures an idyllic atmosphere as Renoir's friends share food, wine, and conversation on a balcony overlooking the Seine at the Maison Fournaise restaurant in Chatou. Parisians flocked to the Maison Fournaise to rent rowing skiffs, eat a good meal, or stay the night.
The painting also reflects the changing character of French society in the mid- to late 19th century. The restaurant welcomed customers of many classes, including businessmen, society women, artists, actresses, writers, critics, seamstresses, and shop girls. This diverse group embodied a new, modern Parisian society.
Renoir seems to have composed this complicated scene without advance studies or underdrawing. He also spent months making numerous changes to the canvas, painting the individual figures when his models were available, and adding the striped awning along the top edge. Nonetheless, Renoir retained the freshness of his vision, even as he revised, rearranged, and created an exquisitely crafted work of art.
A Phillips Collection teaching kit is available for the Luncheon of the Boating Party.
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/Jacques-Louis David (artist)
French, 1748 - 1825
The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries, 1812
oil on canvas
overall: 203.9 x 125.1 cm (80 1/4 x 49 1/4 in.) framed: 243.9 x 165.1 x 15.2 cm (96 x 65 x 6 in.)
Samuel H. Kress Collection
1961.9.15
On View
Careful examination of the details embedded in this portrait reveals the key to David's success as a painter during the time of Louis XVI, Robespierre, and Napoleon: the artist's ability to transform his subjects into politically powerful icons.
Napoleon is placed in the center of a vertical canvas dressed in his uniform as a colonel of the Foot Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard. His pose—the slightly hunched shoulders and hand inserted into his vest—contrasts to the formality of his costume. In addition, his cuffs are unbuttoned, his leggings wrinkled, and his hair disheveled. David, in a letter to the patron of this portrait, Alexander Douglas, the tenth Duke of Hamilton, explained that his appearance was designed to show that Napoleon had spent the night in his study composing the Napoleonic Code, an impression enforced by details, such as the flickering candles that are almost extinguished, the quill pen and papers scattered on the desk, and the clock on the wall which points to 4:13 a.m.
David strategically placed the sword on the chair to allude to Napoleon's military success, while the prominent display of the word "Code" in his papers, suggests his administrative achievements. Other decorative details—the heraldic bees and the fleurs–de–lys—are symbols of French absolutism, and imply Napoleon's power as ruler.
Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)
Jackson Pollock (American, Cody, Wyoming 1912–1956 East Hampton, New York)
Date:
1950
Medium:
Enamel on canvas
Dimensions:
105 x 207in. (266.7 x 525.8cm)
Classification:
Paintings
Credit Line:
George A. Hearn Fund, 1957
Accession Number:
57.92
Rights and Reproduction:
© 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
· Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming. Throughout his childhood, his family lived on a succession of truck farms in Arizona and southern California. When he was sixteen, Pollock first studied art at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, where he met Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish, two friends who later became artists.
In 1930, at age eighteen, Pollock moved from Los Angeles to New York City, settling in Greenwich Village. He immediately enrolled at the Art Students League, where he studied drawing and painting for five semesters with the American Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton, who soon became his mentor and friend.
In 1936 Pollock joined the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros's Experimental Workshop, in New York, where he became aware of unorthodox mediums and techniques that he later adapted in his large drip paintings. In the late 1930s Pollock worked for the Easel Division of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration.
From 1942, when he had his first one-person exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery in New York, until his death in an automobile crash at age forty-four in 1956, Pollock's volatile art and personality made him a dominant figure in the art world and the press. In 1947–48 he devised a radically new innovation: using pour and drip techniques that rely on a linear structure, he created canvases and works on paper that redefined the categories of painting and drawing. Referring to his 1951 exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery, fellow Abstract Expressionist painter Lee Krasner, who was Pollock's wife, noted that his work "seemed like monumental drawing, or maybe painting with the immediacy of drawing — some new category."
Pollock's poured paintings are as visually potent today as they were in the 1950s, when they first shocked the art world. Their appearance virtually shifted the focus of avant-garde art from Paris to New York, and their influence on the development of Abstract Expressionism — and on subsequent painting both in America and abroad — was enormous.
To many, the large eloquent canvases of 1950 are Pollock's greatest achievements. "Autumn Rhythm," painted in October of that year, exemplifies the extraordinary balance between accident and control that Pollock maintained over his technique. The words "poured" and "dripped," commonly used to describe his unorthodox creative process, which involved painting on unstretched canvas laid flat on the floor, hardly suggest the diversity of the artist's movements (flicking, splattering, and dribbling) or the lyrical, often spritual, compositions they produced.
In "Autumn Rhythm," as in many of his paintings, Pollock first created a complex linear skeleton using black paint. For this initial layer the paint was diluted, so that it soaked into the length of unprimed canvas, thereby inextricably joining image and support. Over this black framework Pollock wove an intricate web of white, brown, and turquoise lines, which produce the contrary visual rhythms and sensations: light and dark, thick and thin, heavy and buoyant, straight and curved, horizontal and vertical. Textural passages that contribute to the painting's complexity — such as the pooled swirls where two colors meet and the wrinkled skins formed by the build-up of paint — are barely visible in the initial confusion of overlapping lines. Although Pollock's imagery is nonrepresentational, "Autumn Rhythm" is evocative of nature, not only in its title but also in its coloring, horizontal orientation, and sense of ground and space.