Sur l'île de Chatou

1879 was the year Renoir stayed away from the Impressionist exhibition and sent his work to the official Salon instead. It paid off. His portrait of Madame Charpentier, wife of the publisher who backed Zola, was hung where people could see it and brought in the commissions he needed. In the same seasons he was going out to Chatou, a village on a bend of the Seine about 15 kilometres west of Paris, where the trains delivered city people to row and eat at the riverside inns. He painted his boating party lunch at one of those inns a year or two later.

Here the bank is almost empty, and the greenery, the water and the sky are worked into one another in short strokes.

The canvas hangs in a villa above the Swiss spa town of Baden, where Sidney and Jenny Brown bought French painting through the first decades of the 20th century. Their house opened as a museum in 1990.