Luncheon of the Boating Party painting, combining figures, still-life, and landscape in one work, depicts a group of Renoir's friends relaxing on a balcony at the Maison Fournaise restaurant along the Seine river in Chatou, France. The painter and art patron, Gustave Caillebotte, is seated in the lower right. Renoir's future wife, Aline Charigot, is in the foreground playing with a small dog, an affenpinscher; she replaced an earlier woman who sat for the painting but with whom Renoir became annoyed. On the table is fruit and wine. The diagonal of the railing serves to demarcate the two halves of the composition, one densely packed
The Boating Party in gardens. It is also one of her largest oil paintings. In 1890 Cassatt visited the great Japanese Print exhibition at the ecole de Beaux-arts in Paris. Mary Cassatt owned Japanese prints by Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806). The exhibition at Durand-Ruel of Japanese art proved the most important influence on Cassatt. Frederick A. Sweet suggests that Cassatt may have been inspired by Édouard Manet's "Boating" from 1874."Boating" was exhibited at the (fourth?) Impressionist Exhibition of 1879, where it was not well received. Cassatt however, convinced her friend Louisine Havemeyer to buy it. Much of the work from the Havemeyer collection was