Près du lac

Around 1880 Paris was learning how to spend a day off. The railways had made it easy to get out to the water, and rowing, boating and lounging by a lake became the weekend habit of the middle class. Renoir painted that world for years. Here a man in a straw boater and an open shirt, the uniform of the Sunday oarsman, leans in the shade while a girl beside him talks, her lips just parted. The setting is probably the lake in the Bois de Boulogne, on the edge of the city. Look past the two of them and you will find a small boat out on the water, the reason they came, waiting for whenever they feel like moving again.