The place is real and it is open. The Maison Fournaise was a boathouse restaurant on the Seine at Chatou, where Parisians went to row and eat and stay too long; Renoir painted the end of a lunch there in 1875. It closed in 1906, stood empty for most of a century, and was reopened in 1990.
A railway, a boat yard and a balcony
Alphonse Fournaise built a boat yard at Chatou in 1857 and added a restaurant and a few rooms, because the railway had just put the river within reach of Paris for the afternoon. The red-brick building with the balcony went up in 1867.
Renoir spent whole summers there. He painted Fournaise's daughter Alphonsine and his son Alphonse, he painted the river and the boats, and in 1880 and 1881 he used that same balcony for Luncheon of the Boating Party.
This picture is five years earlier and much smaller, and it is not an event. Lunch is over. The plates have gone, the light is coming through the awning in patches, and the man in the straw boater has his arm along the back of a chair and no intention of leaving. Nobody is talking to the painter.
Theo van Gogh had it for one day
It was shown in Paris in April 1876, at the second Impressionist exhibition, as Déjeûner chez Fournaise. Then it went through the trade, and the dates in the Art Institute's provenance are worth reading slowly.
Renoir let it go to Durand-Ruel in July 1881 for six hundred francs. On 21 November 1887 a dealer called Alphonse Legrand passed it to Boussod, Valadon & Cie for two hundred. The man running that branch was Theo van Gogh, who was paying his brother Vincent's bills at the time. He moved the Renoir on the next day, 22 November, for three hundred and fifty.
So Theo owned this painting for about twenty-four hours and made a hundred and fifty francs on it. In March 1892 Durand-Ruel bought it back for thirteen hundred, and the following month it went to Potter Palmer of Chicago.
Eighty-four empty years
Fournaise's closed in 1906 and the building was left. It stood on the bank of the Seine, empty, through two world wars and most of the twentieth century, while the paintings made in it went to Washington and Chicago and became the picture of a French summer.
In 1990 the town of Chatou restored it, with money raised in the United States by the Friends of French Art. It works as a restaurant again, with a small museum in it.
The balcony is the same balcony, and the view off it is the one in the painting. The river is the same river, and the island is still called the island of the Impressionists, which is the kind of name a place only gets afterwards.
The plates were cleared in 1875 and the place shut in 1906. Lunch has been going again since 1990.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.