On the Banks of the Seine at Rueil

1879 was the year Renoir stopped exhibiting with his friends. The Impressionists held their fourth group show that spring and he stayed out of it, sending instead to the official Salon, where his large portrait of Madame Charpentier, the wife of a Paris publisher, and her two children was hung where people could actually see it. The reviews were good and the portrait commissions started coming. Rueil sits on the Seine just west of Paris, a short train ride out, on the same loop of river as the boating restaurants at Chatou that he would paint a year later. Cologne had almost no French Impressionism for most of the 20th century. This landscape arrived there in 2001, with the collection the Swiss couple Gerard and Marisa Corboud placed with the Wallraf-Richartz Museum.