Das Boot

By the late 1870s a Parisian could take a morning train out to the Seine villages west of the city, hire a boat for the afternoon and be home by evening. Renoir went out to those places constantly, often to the island of Chatou, and this small picture, barely 27 centimetres tall, catches one of them. A boat lies moored under trees with a woman in white seated in the bows and the helm seat opposite her empty, which is usually read as meaning her companion is somewhere just out of the frame. It hangs today in a villa in the Swiss town of Baden, where Sidney and Jenny Brown started buying French painting around 1907 and kept going until their house held one of the most important private collections of French Impressionism in Europe.