‘They knew how to enjoy themselves,” David Hockney once told me, gleefully pointing out the cigarette and cigar butts littering the ground under Renoir’s dancers. There are broken clay-pipes too beneath the swirling pink skirts and blue trousers of the couple in his tall, narrow 1883 canvas Dance at Bougival as they bring their faces close, placing their arms around each other and pirouetting in the soft, airy space Renoir makes you feel as well as see. It’s an outdoor afternoon dance enclosed by fluffy, lime-coloured trees. A couple sitting at a table get friendlier with each swig of beer.
And oh, the lunches! Renoir seems to have invented the slow French lunch, relaxed and liquid, that launched a thousand bistro daydreams. In After the Luncheon, another one to delight Hockney, we see a white-clothed, open air table neatly arranged with porcelain coffee cups, carafes and glasses – and a woman sipping a liqueur while the bearded man she’s lunching with lights up, savouring the moment as his cigarette end glows fire-red against the pale blues, whites and silvers. The Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise (The Rowers’ Lunch) lingers on the same climactic moment, one man lounging back in tobacco reverie while the lovers or about-to-be-lovers on the other side of the table chat soulfully.
