 Hi everyone and welcome to Barns Takeout, your daily serving of art. My name is Martha Lucy and I work at the Barns. I oversee our education department and collections research and like most of you, I am at home right now. I am missing the world, I'm missing my friends and my co-workers and my extended family and I'm also missing the collection at the Barns. And I imagine that some of you are as well, so we have decided to do these daily talks. My co-workers and I, colleagues who are scholars and curators and conservators and educators, we're going to be presenting a short talk every day about some of our favorite works in the collection. So there will be a new one every day, just go to YouTube and check to see what's there. So the one that I've chosen for today is called The Luncheon and it is a painting by Pierre Auguste Renoir, the impressionist painter and it was painted in 1875. The reason that I chose this one, there are a couple reasons. One is it's just so gorgeously painted and I'm going to show you some close-ups in a minute to sort of show you what I'm talking about. Second, I like the food theme, it's kind of related to our takeout theme here. But mostly I chose this because it's got such a great human quality to it. It's really just a warm painting that's about human interaction and human interaction in a public space. So here you're looking at a photograph of the barn's galleries. This is room 13 where the painting hangs and you can see it right here hanging next to right in between other Renoirs. In fact, everything on this wall, all of the paintings that is, are by Pierre Auguste Renoir. It's the only wall in the collection that's devoted to an entire artist and that is because Albert Barnes loved Renoir. I think that's probably something of an understatement. He collected 181 works by this artist. And mostly he loved the works from later in Renoir's career, so from 1890-ish until his death in 1919. But the luncheon is a sort of rarity in the Barnes collection because it's an earlier work. It was done during the 1870s. So during kind of at the height of Renoir's impressionist period, it's a simple subject. It's two people having lunch. You can see soup terrine over here. They're having some wine. Here's the wine bottle. There's a baguette at the table on the table. And the scene takes place in a restaurant. It seems like there's probably a window that they're sitting next to because there seems to be some natural light that's falling on the table and that's especially falling on the woman. But how do we know that this is a restaurant? Maybe this is, why would we assume that? Why wouldn't we think that maybe this is people just in their home sitting down for lunch? Well the clue to that really lies in this hat, this boaters hat that's sitting in the foreground hanging on the edge of a chair. The boaters hat tells you that this is a couple that is probably on a canoe outing. They are taking a break to have lunch. They are spending a day on the river. This is probably meant to be taking place in the suburbs of Paris. We don't know where for sure but it was a really popular activity at the time for Parisians to go on these sort of boat outings and to stop for lunch. And because of the popularity of this new form of leisure, all these little restaurants kind of cropped up along the banks of the Seine in places like Chateau. And one of Renoir's most famous paintings, the Luncheon of the Boating Party, which is at the Phillips Collection, is of a similar subject. It shows a big group having, you know, breaking for lunch. And so that one, that one we know takes place in Chateau. But this one doesn't show a big group. It doesn't even show you the rest of the restaurant. It's really zoomed in on just this one couple having a private conversation. And it's a very quiet painting. And I think that Renoir really meant for it to be a quiet painting, an intimate painting. You're brought close up to them. You feel like you could kind of even maybe be at the table with them. One of the things that really draws me to this picture and that makes me appreciate it so much is the way that they're interacting. Just the little details that Renoir includes that are so just well observed from the way that people really behave. And I'm talking about, look at the man's hand and the way that he's got his fingers just kind of resting on the stem of the glass. And the way that he's gazing at her and the way that she's leaning forward, doing something with her knife and kind of leaning into the conversation, either talking and trying to make a point or listening. It's hard to tell who's talking at this moment. But Renoir, the point is that there are just these subtle little details and these little moments of body language that make the painting so relatable. Renoir was just a master of capturing all the kind of subtleties of human gesture. When this painting was first exhibited in Paris, the French critics wrote about it. And I think because it was such a painting that you can kind of enter into in a way, they love to kind of imagine what was going on here. And a lot, you know, some of them said, oh, well, this is definitely, you know, these people are on a secret getaway. This is some sort of romantic trist. But just to look for a minute at like more closely at the way that it's painted, especially the still life on the table, it's pretty spectacular. And I'm going to zoom in here a little bit just to show you. Look at that. Look at the soup terry in here when you when you get close to it. From a distance, it kind of looks like you can you sort of know, you know that it's it's silver and that the white is meant to kind of make it look shiny. But look how it's composed of so many different colors. He is just boldly kind of slapping paint on there and kind of brushing together reds and yellows. And it's so dynamic, this part and the bread, the baguette, which he which he brushes through with these red strokes that kind of bleed into the the terrain so that you're getting that so that the edges of these objects are becoming kind of they're no longer distinct. They're the color is kind of connecting them together. And that's that was a very radical thing to do at the time to not have individual objects in your painting, like bounded, you know, securely bounded look also just at these little things that he does. You know, this little this little mark, this little dash of yellow here on this on the knife and and just this little touch of white here that that lets you know that she's holding. I think that without that, I don't know if you would realize that she was holding a knife in her hand. Maybe you would because of the way that her that her her fingers are clenched. But it's just that little thing that that that kind of triggers that in your mind and gives you that information. What really kind of bulls me over here, though, is the wine glasses because look how he's rendering these objects that are solid objects. They are physical solid objects. But he look at this one especially, there's no outline to them. He he manages to give you the feeling and the look of a wine glass without any edges to it. The wine glass is communicated is conveyed solely through color, just dashes of paint. And I love these sort of little licks of red in the bottom of the glasses that let you know that there are just a couple of sips of wine left. Also over here, this this stroke here, just this lovely, I think it's the only stroke of green of that color green and the whole painting. And it's meant to kind of show the top of the bottle. But just look how how lively that brush stroke is. And then I want to back to that that idea. His ability to to define objects, to define dimensions and volume, only using color, is one of the things that makes Rymor so masterful. And I was just I was looking at this painting this morning, and I was I just kept staring at the take off. And at the edge of the table here and looking at how he is able to to tell you that this is a sharp corner here. Again, it's not he's not using line. He's just using color. And but then if you look up here onto the wall, it's like this amazing contrast. And I don't know if it's deliberate, but you know, the decoration, on the wallpaper or or this paneling, whatever it is, is a traditional kind of linear articulation of a corner. And then it just stands an amazing contrast to this, the articulation of this corner down here. That's done in a completely different way. Renoir was also a just a master at composition. I mean, he could use color. Really like, like nobody. But also the little tricks that he does to to make his paintings hold together. You know, the way that all the objects on the table are arranged to kind of create this X. That just gives that it makes the painting hold together. Things like that. See the the bread, this knife here, the glasses that make this diagonal, even this knife here. So all of these things are are why this is one of my favorite paintings at the barns and I can't wait to go see it again in person. I think that, you know, if this painting was was it was painted almost 150 years ago, but it's still so relatable. I think because of that. I mean, everybody can recognize the kind of conversation that these people are having and can relate to it. And Albert Barnes actually said that this was one of the things that drew him to work with. And Albert Barnes actually said that this was one of the things that drew him to Renoir was Renoir's ability to communicate kind of human emotion and human sensation. So I hope that you enjoyed this. Please stay safe and join us again tomorrow for another Barnes take out. Bye.