Oarsmen at Chatou

Chatou and the adjacent Restaurant Fournaise on an island in the Seine were the social centre of Renoir's most sociable and exuberant period of painting. He worked there repeatedly from the mid-1870s through the early 1880s, drawn by the intersection of river leisure — boating, swimming, social drinking — with the natural light conditions of the water and the human richness of the mixed-class crowd that the Seine riverside attracted on weekends. Oarsmen at Chatou at the National Gallery of Art, painted in 1879, belongs to the run of river paintings that culminated in the Luncheon of the Boating Party of 1881 — arguably the greatest achievement of French Impressionist figure painting and certainly Renoir's most ambitious single canvas of the Impressionist decade. The oarsmen here prefigure the more elaborate social world of the Boating Party: they are young men at leisure on the river, the outdoor physical energy of their sport providing Renoir with the dynamic, masculine figure study he found more challenging than his usual seated female subjects. The Seine as backdrop, its light-reflecting surface surrounding and illuminating the figures, gave him the enveloping luminosity that became the visual signature of the Chatou paintings.

The action of rowing — bodies in coordinated physical effort — provides Renoir with the dynamic, gestural figure study that he found particularly satisfying. The reflected light from the Seine's surface illuminates the figures from below as well as above, creating an enveloping luminosity distinct from the simpler top-lighting of studio work. The water's movement around the boat is suggested through directional brushwork rather than labored descriptive detail.