Édouard Manet was no great admirer of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s paintings. Once he went so far as to tell Claude Monet to take Renoir aside and convince him to give it all up: “You can see for yourself that it’s not his job.” Monet either failed to pass along this advice or else Renoir chose to ignore it - and a lucky thing, too, because he went on to produce one of the most appealing of all of the Impressionist canvases, Luncheon of the Boating Party. Few paintings are quite so inviting. A group of people fourteen people, nine men and five women, are gathered on the terrace of a riverside café on a summer’s day. The wine flows, the sun shines, boats drift lazily past. Who wouldn’t want to join their company?

Thanks to Susan Vreeland’s new novel, Luncheon of the Boating Party, we can do exactly that. Vreeland’s recent collection of short stories, the charming Life Studies, introduced readers to many people who had walk-on roles in French art: Monet’s gardener, Manet’s wife, Modigliani’s daughter. In Luncheon of the Boating Party she sets us a place at the table in the Maison Fournaise where, for eight remarkable weeks in the summer of 1880, Renoir assembles an engaging cast of characters and struggles to complete his masterpiece.

The story begins with the accident-prone Renoir crashing his steam-cycle (a nice emblem of la vie moderne) beside the Seine as he makes his way to the restaurant. He conceives the idea of restoring his flagging fortunes by painting a large, many-peopled canvas along the lines of his Bal au Moulin de la Galette, done four years earlier. The painting will be hugely important for his career, and for Impressionism more generally. A half-dozen years after the First Impressionist Exhibition, disagreements over how and when to exhibit are beginning to split the painters. Meanwhile the writer Émile Zola, once a staunch supporter, wounds Renoir with a review claiming that Impressionism has failed to produce a “man of genius.” As for Renoir himself, he is approaching his fortieth birthday, grieving for a dead lover, and having no end of trouble selling his paintings. Can his giant new canvas turn things around?

Renoir’s painting may show us a carefree scene, but its creation turns out to have been anything but. Renoir begins recruiting his models to pose at the riverside restaurant, eventually putting together a motley group of friends and acquaintances from Paris’s salons and cafés (through which Vreeland expertly guides us). The tricky logistics of such a large cast soon become apparent: besides modelling fees, Renoir must somehow provide food and wine for the party for eight consecutive Sundays - the time it will take to paint the work. There are other costs as well. Renoir suffers fits of despondency as he works on the canvas, which he repeatedly scrapes down and alters. He also has problems with his models: one flounces out, while another almost gets himself killed in a duel. Before long, Renoir begins running short of money for food, lodgings and pigment.

The beauty of Vreeland’s novel is how she shows Renoir coming to terms with his models not merely as models but as people. To paint them, he must learn to see them as more than simply dots and dashes of pigment. He has the “vision to see hundreds of colors,” but is blind, initially at least, to the lives and dreams of the people he paints. “Isn’t there anything more to you than a brush?” asks one of them, Alphonsine Fournaise, daughter of the restaurant’s proprietor.

It’s the lives and dreams of these models that Vreeland explores, deftly filling in Renoir’s blindspots and spinning a narrative by turns comic and poignant. Alphonsine is both in the center of the painting and at the heart of the novel. We learn her affecting story - an act of humanity in the midst of war - and watch her fall in love with Renoir as he paints. Her posing for him on the terrace is, she realizes, the “great moment in her life.” But there’s little place for Alphonsine in the painter’s affections. Renoir is captivated instead by another of his models, Aline, a 19-year-old seamstress who - in another appealing vignette - sews herself a costume so she can pose in the picture.

After the canvas is finished, an art dealer tells Renoir: “Marvelous the stories you hint at in the interactions.” After reading the novel we can agree: what stories indeed, delicately brushed to life in the pages of Vreeland’s novel. 

Ross King is the author of the critically acclaimed JUDGMENT OF PARIS.