Luncheon (Le Déjeuner)

Luncheon of 1875 belongs to the years when Renoir was most sharply distinguished from his Impressionist contemporaries by his fundamental orientation toward pleasure rather than optical problem-solving. While Monet was interrogating the dissolution of form in light and Pissarro was methodically mapping the structure of the rural landscape, Renoir was painting the bourgeois social rituals of Paris — its cafés, gardens, and informal gatherings — with a warmth that his friend and critic Georges Rivière called an attitude toward life as much as a technique. The painting connects to a sequence of outdoor and semi-outdoor luncheon subjects he was developing through the mid-1870s, including canvases at the Restaurant Fournaise at Chatou that culminated in the great Luncheon of the Boating Party in 1881. This earlier version shows the gathered friends with the loose, feathery touch of his purest Impressionist years, the figures bathed in the kind of filtered garden light he achieved with particular mastery between 1874 and 1877. The art market for Impressionism in 1875 was hostile — the group's auction at Hôtel Drouot that March was a disaster — yet these canvases represent Renoir at his most uncompromisingly himself.

Renoir's brushwork combines feathery, flickering strokes with a sensuous warmth of palette. He favored dappled light filtering through foliage, pearlescent skin tones set against vibrant backgrounds, and a compositional looseness that conveys pleasure and ease.