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Introducing Susan Vreeland's
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Luncheon of the Boating Party
New York Times Best Seller
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Painting on the Book Cover is by: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Déjeuner des Canotiers
(Luncheon of the Boating Party), 1880-81,
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
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Instantly recognizable, beloved the world over, Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party
serves as an icon of an age, a place, an art movement at its apogee, and an ideal of human
desire and sociability.
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As impressionistically dazzling and humane as the Renoir painting that inspires it, Luncheon of the Boating Party is itself a true work of art that blends the manifest joys and the impossible longings of life into a single coherent vision. Susan Vreeland has for some time been one of our finest writers, and this is her best book yet.
--Robert Olen Butler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
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Paris, Summer, 1880
Émile Zola: "The Impressionists are inferior to what they undertake. The man of genius has not yet arisen."
Pierre-Auguste Renoir: "I'm going to blow the whole stuffy Salon apart with a painting Zola
won't dare deny is genius!"
The pressure is on. Renoir has only two months before the good light is gone and he must
relinquish the terrace setting for the grand regattas. What obstacles will he face? What
turnabouts will occur? What life changes?
An actress, a mime, a journalist, an adventurer, a singer-flower seller, an art collector,
a poet, a boatman, a baron, a yachtsman-painter, and more.
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