La Senna a Chatou

1874 was the year Renoir and his friends gave up on the Salon and put on their own show, opening in April in a photographer's empty studio on the boulevard des Capucines. Renoir hung the pictures. That same year he was working out on the Seine at Chatou, a village about 15 kilometres west of Paris that the Saint-Germain railway had turned into a weekend resort for clerks and boating parties, and it is the railway bridge in the distance that lets people fix the spot. Durand-Ruel, the dealer who kept most of these painters solvent, bought the canvas from Renoir in 1891 and sold it on to a collector in Le Havre nine years later. It reached Dallas with the collection of Emery and Wendy Reves, who lived on the Riviera in a villa built for Coco Chanel, and the museum rebuilt several of its rooms to hold what they gave.