The Boat Ride, 1889

Oil on canvas signed and dedicated lower left. 

On the back: signed, titled "Le soir", numbered n°2 and dated 1889.

Dimensions:   92 x 65.5cm, 

with frame: 121.5 x 94 cm.

This painting by Roger Jourdain immerses us in “La Belle Époque”; it bears witness to the sweetness of life on Sundays spent at the water's edge, on the banks of the Seine.

It captures the atmosphere of this place where many Parisians came to relax.

The scene is imbued with a serene melancholy.

Two elegant women are seated, facing each other, on a boat. They stopped at the edge of the river, in the shade and out of sight for an intimate discussion. We see in the distance another boat spinning on the water on which a man in a boater and a woman protected from the rays of the sun by an umbrella are walking along the water.

The impressionist touch is put to the service of the vibrations of the reflections on the water.

The mahogany color of the boat's wood, which echoes the reddish hair of the elegant woman on the back, as well as the black of her outfit, warm up and contrast the soft gradation of blue-green colors of the landscape.

The banks of the Seine or the Marne inspired the greatest impressionist painters of the time, including Renoir, Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, Caillebotte...

Roger Jourdain enters the School of Fine Arts in Paris where he is a pupil of Alexandre Cabanel. He began at the Salon in 1869 and regularly exhibited there landscapes and seascapes of a serene sensibility that he painted in Normandy or on the banks of the Seine, in Pecq or the Thames, in Cookham. He also performed genre scenes. Around 1876, he had a mansion built by the architect near Parc Monceau. He sold this hotel in 1878 to the painter Guillaume Dubufe. This will become the Jean Jacques Henner National Museum. His wife, Henriette Marie Dubois de Moulignon, became the model for painters   John Singer Sargent, Giovanni Boldini and Albert Besnard.

Roger Jourdain was the mayor of   Rueil-Malmaison from 1900 to 1906.,

He donated a number of canvases and landscape studies to the Louviers museum. He will be medaled Knight of the Legion of Honor.