A homecoming, twice over
In the spring of 2006, The Phillips Collection reopened after a major expansion — new galleries, the Rothko Room, an auditorium, a library, a sculpture garden. About sixty of the museum's European paintings, Renoir and Cézanne and Van Gogh among them, had spent the previous four years on tour while the building was rebuilt around them. Luncheon of the Boating Party, the Phillips's best-known painting, was coming home too.
To mark the occasion, the museum invited Dana Ellyn to spend the day on the sidewalk out front, recreating the Renoir in pastel chalk at close to its own scale — a public, temporary companion piece to the real thing hanging just inside.
The recreation
Ellyn worked from a small reference photo, gridded out and pinned to the pavement, building the piece up square by square in pastel chalk through the day. A crowd gathered and stayed — museum members, families out for the weekend, kids sitting right up against the edges of the piece to watch it take shape.
Coming home, twice
Twenty years on, the painting has done it again. In early 2026, the Phillips lent Luncheon of the Boating Party to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, where it hung in Renoir and Love: A Joyful Modernity (1865–1885), a major retrospective co-organized with the National Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, running March 17 through July 19, 2026. In exchange, the Phillips is set to display the Musée d'Orsay's Bal du moulin de la Galette in the summer of 2027.
The Renoir is scheduled to return to Gallery 201 at the Phillips in August 2026 — the same painting, walking back through the same door on 21st Street, twenty years after the chalk on the sidewalk outside marked the last time it came home.