Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [204]
I absolutely love books devoted to single works of art, so I was thrilled when Scala published Renoir: Luncheon of the Boating Party (2003) in its 4-Fold series, a great concept with pages that fold out vertically and horizontally. A who’s who of the figures in the painting reveals that painter Gustave Caillebotte is among the lively group on the terrace of the restaurant La Maison Fournaise, along with Charles Ephrussi, Baron Raoul Barbier, Aline Charigot—the seamstress Renoir met in 1880 and married ten years later—and Alphonsine and Alphonse Fournaise, daughter and son of the restaurateur, Alphonse Sr. The book refers to the work as “a clear attempt to match the achievement of some of the old masters Renoir admired in the Louvre”—notably Veronese’s Wedding at Cana and Watteau’s Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera—and “a fête champêtre set in a modern industrialized world.”
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (Photo Credit 43.1)
La Maison Fournaise began on the Île de Chatou, a small island in the Seine just west of Paris, in 1857, when Alphonse realized there was an opportunity to cater to all the visitors the expanded railroad had brought to Chatou, beginning twenty years earlier. The train enabled working-class Parisians, who worked a six-day workweek with only Sundays free, to buy an inexpensive round-trip ticket to the Seine suburbs of Chatou, Argenteuil, Asnières, and Bougival. Alphonse started by renting out small boats and added a restaurant and hotel in 1860. La Grenouillère, the restaurant and swimming establishment in Bougival (made famous in paint by both Monet and Renoir), by this time had begun to be too crowded. Visitors looked farther afield to Fournaise. In 1877 a terrace and balcony were added, and Alphonse Jr. took over its operation in 1890. By the time he passed away in 1900, bicycling had outpaced boating as an attraction, but Alphonsine continued to run the restaurant until 1906. She offered lodging until she died in 1937, leaving La Maison Fournaise to cousins. In 1953 the property was sold and became an apartment building; it fell into disrepair and was purchased by the town of Chatou in 1979. After a lengthy renovation, it reopened in 1990 and, somewhat remarkably perhaps, La Maison Fournaise remains much the same.
Chatou, which has been renamed the Île des Impressionnistes, is easy to reach by car, RER, bus, and river transport. Check out the Maison Fournaise Web site (restaurant-fournaise.fr) for directions and more about its history, and to compare before and after pictures of the restoration.
When crossing the Seine I repeat to myself: “My God, how beautiful Paris is!” as if I were the first one to say it. Beside Tarascon, I don’t know where else I could live!
—Inès de la Fressange, Paris
PERSONALITIES
God invented Parisians so that foreigners would be unable to understand the French.
—ALEXANDRE DUMAS
Actually, it was the people, the streets, the life that brought me back to the city of the Seine. Above all, the people. They make the streets; they make the life; they make Paris. It should be obvious, but it isn’t. “How,” Gertrude Stein once asked, “can foreigners say they like France but not the French? It’s the French who made the France they like—and keep it that way.”
—JOSEPH BARRY, The People of Paris
The Master of the Machine
JOHN RUSSELL
THE MUSÉE NATIONAL Fernand Léger (musee-fernandleger.fr), in Biot, on the Côte d’Azur, is an excellent museum I recommend highly. There aren’t a great number of works by Léger in Paris, but there are some to be found, notably