Luncheon of the Boating Party

by Susan Vreeland

About the book…
     Instantly recognizable, Auguste Renoir’s masterpiece depicts a gathering of his real friends enjoying a summer Sunday on a cafe terrace along the Seine near Paris. A wealthy painter, an art collector, an Italian journalist, a war hero, a celebrated actress, and Renoir’s future wife, among others, share this moment of la vie moderne, a time when social constraints were loosening and Paris was healing after the Franco-Prussian War. Parisians were bursting with a desire for pleasure and a yearning to create something extraordinary out of life. Renoir shared these urges and took on this most challenging project at a time of personal crises in art and love, all the while facing issues of loyalty and the diverging styles that were tearing apart the Impressionist group.
     Narrated by Renoir and seven of the models and using settings in Paris and on the Seine, Vreeland illuminates the gusto, hedonism, and art of the era. With a gorgeous palette of vibrant, captivating characters, she paints their lives, loves, losses, and triumphs in a brilliant portrait of her own.

About the author…
     Since the publication of her bestselling Girl in Hyacinth Blue, novelist Susan Vreeland has explored the relationships between life and art, rendering scenes from Amsterdam to Rome to the Canadian wilderness with sensitivity and a delicate, painterly precision.
     "When I was nine, my great grandfather, a landscape painter, taught me to mix colors," Vreeland recalls in an interview on her publisher's web site. "With his strong hand surrounding my small one, he guided the brush until a calla lily appeared as if by magic on a page of textured watercolor paper. How many girls throughout history would have longed to be taught that, but had to do washing and mending instead."
     As a grown woman, Vreeland found her own magical way of translating her vision of the world into art. While teaching high school English in the 1980s, she began to write, publishing magazine articles, short stories, and her first novel, What Love Sees. In 1996, Vreeland was diagnosed with lymphoma, which forced her to take time off from teaching -- time she spent undergoing medical treatment and writing stories about a fictional Vermeer  painting.
     Creative endeavor can aid healing because it lifts us out of self-absorption and gives us a goal," she later wrote. In Vreeland's case, her goal "was to live long enough to finish this set of stories that reflected my sensibilities, so that my writing group of twelve dear friends might be given these and know that in my last months I was happy -- because I was creating."
     Vreeland recovered from her illness and wove her stories into a novel, Girl in Hyacinth Blue. The book was a national bestseller, praised by The New York Times as "intelligent, searching and unusual" and by Kirkus Reviews as "extraordinarily skilled historical fiction: deft, perceptive, full of learning, deeply moving." Its interrelated stories move backward in time, creating what Marion Lignana Rosenberg in Salon called "a kind of Chinese box unfolding from the contemporary hiding-place of a painting attributed to Vermeer all the way back to the moment the work was conceived."
     Vreeland's next novel, The Passion of Artemisia, was based on the life of the 17th-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi, often regarded as the first woman to hold a significant place in the history of European art. "Forthright and imaginative, Vreeland's deft recreation ably showcases art and life," noted Publishers Weekly.
     Love for the visual arts, especially painting, continues to fire Vreeland's literary imagination. Her new novel, The Forest Lover, is a fictional exploration of the life of the 20th-century Canadian artist Emily Carr. She has also written a series of art-related short stories. For Vreeland, art provides inspiration for living as well as for literature. As she put it in an autobiographical essay, "I hope that by writing art-related fiction, I might bring readers who may not recognize the enriching and uplifting power of art to the realization that it can serve them as it has so richly served me."
 

Discussion Questions:

1. How do you think Renoir’s humble beginnings affected his life and his painting?
2. Describe what you think was going through Renoir’s mind as he took on the technical challenge of this painting. Was he ready for this? How was he to achieve the perspective? Position the figures? Anchor the terrace? Convey the river below?
3. Discuss the level of commitment each character had to the painting. How did their involvement affect the painting? Do you relate to any one of the characters in the painting Luncheon of the Boating Party?
4. How do the separate models’ plots act upon the progress of the painting and enlighten a single common theme? Which of the male models is your favorite? And of the female models? Why does each hold a place in your affections?
5. In what ways do the models' stories and lives depict what was then thought of as la vie moderne? Considering the characters who are not models, which ones contribute to the concept of la vie moderne? How do these characters give life and fullness to the novel?
6. How did the fact that there was time pressure to finish the painting affect its result? Would the painting have turned out differently if Renoir had had more time to work on it?
7. Renoir seems to fall in love over and over again with the two things he most adored: the female form and the riverscape. He saw one woman as color, another as line. Was there something about the season in which he was painting and his relationships with Aline and Alphonsine that contributed to the overall effect of the image?
8. Why did Renoir hate the term “Impressionist” so much?
9. Throughout the novel there are social contrasts--rich and poor, suffering and insouciance, past and present, city and country, war and peace, friends and enemies. Speculate on how these serve to make the novel transcend the period depicted.
10. Consider the character of Gustave in terms of personality, strengths, weaknesses, motives. Auguste remarks that he and Gustave both have ambiguities and double roles in their natures and lives. What might he have been referring to and why is it ironic? How do these alternate roles play out in the course of the novel? How are these two characters opposites and how are they similar?
11. When the models are finished posing for the last time, Jules quotes from the poem "Fra Lippo Lippi" by Robert Browning. How does the poem reflect the narrative? The poem's next two lines are: "God uses us to help each other so,/Lending our minds out." Does this change what you've said in answer to the first part of this question?
12. Why was loving her neighbor as herself an immediate natural response one time in Alphonsine's life, and a complicated thing another time? That is, what resided in her thought which made it complicated? What are the stakes for her in both circumstances? What gift does Alphonsine have in the end? How has she changed, and by what means?
13. Do you see or sense any change in Renoir from beginning to end? What did the painting give him in terms of his art as well as in other ways?
14. After the last luncheon, Renoir is looking at the five women who modeled for the painting. He says that all of them are brave. How does his assessment apply to each one individually? How does this remark relate to his other remark that he paints women as he would paint carrots?
15. In what way does Luncheon of the Boating Party signal any healing of France for Alphonsine? For anyone? Or do you disagree, and it is not a signal of healing? Renoir wrote in his notebook, "When art becomes a useless thing, it is the beginning of the end." How does this relate to healing? To our time?
16. In what ways, if any, did the novel surprise you? How do you react to a novel that incorporates real and well known people as characters? Did anything in the novel affect the way you had previously thought about Renoir? Impressionism? Impressionists? Paris? The French people? French culture.