Pierre-Auguste Renoir – Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise

Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise – summer light through the leaves

Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise is an oil painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir from 1875. The original measures 66 cm x 55 cm and is held by the Art Institute of Chicago. We paint our version by hand in oils on canvas, in eight landscape sizes, from 50 x 40 to 150 x 125 cm. Among them is 66 x 55 cm, exactly the measurement of the original, with 110 x 90 cm for a larger wall.

Blue shadows instead of black ones

On this canvas Renoir caught the sunlight of a fine summer day pouring through the leaves of the trees into an open-air restaurant. Like the scene itself, the colours and the brushwork are airy and relaxed. In this period he gave himself to colour in the open air, full of light, and left the blacks and greys of the palette almost entirely aside. That is why the shadows on the white clothes and on the tablecloths are pale blue, and it is exactly those blue shadows that agree with the dark colours of the woman’s dress and with the tones in the river – what elsewhere would be a neutral grey is colour here.

Why hand-painted, not a print

Our version is not a print. The whole scene rests on the shadows being blue rather than grey, and that is the first difference a print loses: the screen pushes the shadows toward a neutral middle and the white cloth takes on a dirty grey instead of a cool blue. A hand-painted canvas keeps the colour in the shadow as colour, because there it really is painted, and not as a darkened white. The difference shows most on the largest white areas, that is, on the cloth and on the clothing.

In the room

The scene is horizontal, bright and full, but without hard contrasts, so it works well where people eat, sit and talk: in a dining room above the table, in a kitchen, or in a living room above the sofa. For an ordinary room we suggest 80 x 70 or 90 x 75 cm, while the measurement of the original, 66 x 55 cm, suits a narrower wall. On a large wall 130 x 110 or 150 x 125 cm works, where the blue shadows on the cloth separate from the white. Below 50 x 40 cm it is exactly that difference which is lost.

What you receive

We paint the canvas to order, by hand and for you alone, so every copy is made on its own; the canvas is usually painted and dried within three to four weeks. If you prefer, we will paint it in a size that is not on the list. Before despatch we send you a photograph of the finished canvas for your approval, and only then does the painting go out. Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise arrives stretched on a wooden frame and ready to hang, wrapped in protective film and in rigid packaging, with no further stretching or finishing needed.

• Subject: lunch in the open air under trees beside the river, Pierre-Auguste Renoir
• Technique: hand-painted oil painting on canvas, stretched on a wooden frame
• Sizes: 8 sizes, from 50 x 40 cm to 150 x 125 cm, another size on request
• Detail worth knowing: the shadows on the white cloths and clothes are not grey but pale blue – Renoir had almost dropped black and grey from the palette

See also:

• La Loge (The Theatre Box)
• Mother Anthony’s Tavern
• The Swing (La Balançoire)