Impressionists on the Seine: A Celebration of Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party

This exceptionally beautiful catalogue of an exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., brings together the river scenes made along the banks of the Seine by French impressionists--Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, douard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Gustave Caillebotte--between 1868 and 1882. It was along the Seine that these painters made breakthroughs with rapid, broken brushstrokes, a bright palette, explorations of light and color. They also delineated a broad socioeconomic mix of contemporary Parisians, while recording the incursions of industry, tourism and organized leisure activities on halcyon rural and suburban areas. Special attention is given to the techniques employed by Renoir in his monumental figure painting Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881). Essays by Rathbone, chief curator at the Phillips Collection, as well as other curators and scholars not only document the Seine's centrality to impressionism but also investigate its role as theme and symbol in Corot, Seurat and etcher Charles-Fran ois Daubigny, in French photography and in the writings of Flaubert, Zola and Guy de Maupassant. (Nov.)