Technical Summary:

Renoir’s Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise (The Rowers’ Lunch) was painted in several wet-in-wet campaigns and contains a number of compositional changes. The artist began with a commercially primed standard portrait no. 15 canvas turned on its side, onto which he likely added a selective preparatory layer covering specific parts of the compositional area.2 This selective layer incorporates added oil medium and a warmer hue, which, allowed for minimum absorption of subsequent paint layers and provided a warm background off which the artist could play the cool colors of the background and water.

There are significant compositional changes in the left half of the composition. X-ray and raking light images suggest that in an earlier version of the painting, there was a figure situated in the space between the two individuals at left in the final composition. Summary underdrawing lines in a dry medium may be related to this figure’s head; additional lines seem to indicate the left side of the trellis opening and the outer curve of the far left visible figure’s leg, however the nature of these lines is rather intermittent and haphazard. It seems the left side of the original composition featured only this single figure painted in profile. Heavy brushwork under the far-left visible figure suggests additional changes before the artist executed the forward-facing male figure.