The Boat on the Lake

The Boat on the Lake of 1901 at Southampton City Art Gallery revisits the boating leisure subjects that Renoir had produced with brilliant results during the Chatou period of the 1870s and early 1880s. The Southampton collection, which documents British regional engagement with French Impressionism through the early twentieth century, holds this late canvas as evidence of the nostalgia and retrospective quality of some of Renoir's late subjects. By 1901 the boating culture of the Seine's riverside restaurants — the world of Chatou and Fournaise that had produced the Luncheon of the Boating Party — belonged to his past, and the lake scene of this canvas has a different, more pastoral quality than the socially specific river subjects of his peak. The reflective stillness of a lake rather than the flowing current of the Seine suited the more meditative, atmospheric quality of his late work, the boat and its occupants dissolving into the surrounding light and water rather than asserting the social vitality that characterized his earlier river paintings. Southampton's holding of this late canvas alongside works of the British school allows the visual relationship between French Impressionism and British art of the period to be appreciated.

Water reflections in Renoir's lake scenes are handled with broken, flickering strokes that suggest the animated surface disturbed by a light breeze and by the passage of the boat. The interplay between boat, figures, and reflections creates a rich textural weaving across the lower half of the composition.