Susan Vreeland has made a career in writing about artists. She first wrote of an unknown Vermeer painting in “Girl in Hyacinth Blue” and traced it in historical fashion back to its subject, the daughter of the painter.

Told in sections going back in time, “Girl in Hyacinth Blue” traces the provenance of the painting and those who had owned it after it had been sold to pay Vermeer’s debts when he had died. Each scene has a different narrator, some more successful than others, but at the end we realize that a painting can immortalize its subjects.

Next by Vreeland was “The Passion of Artemisia” about Artemisia Gentileschi, the first woman ever elected to the Accademia dell’ Arte in Florence. This 17th-century female artist had to suffer a rape, a well-documented trial after, and a hastily arranged marriage before she could be recognized as a successful painter on her own, especially in a time when respectable women rarely left their homes.

Vreeland’s next book is closer to home as she wrote about Emily Carr, who lived and worked on Vancouver Island in the early 1900s. Carr was another woman who went against society’s dictates to paint the immense primordial forests and the native Squamish of the island. You can visit Carr’s house in Victoria if you wish or read “The Forest Lover” about Carr’s life.

In Vreeland’s latest book, however, she breaks away from the obvious pattern of the first three, which were focused on female protagonists. She takes on the creation of a single painting of Renoir, commonly called “The Luncheon of the Boating Party,” a title that Vreeland adopts for her new book.

As before Vreeland immerses herself into the life of her characters, providing the historical background she has assiduously researched and then expanding what we know of these real people into a historical novel. Some is conjecture, of course, but in the “Boating Party” book, we are introduced to la vie moderne, the change in art from fussy realistic detail to the Impressionists who remade how we see the world.

It is ironic, though, that the “Boating Party” picture actually is an intentional patterned throwback by Renoir. Stung by a negative review by Emile Zola, Renoir set out to make a formal painting with 14 subjects in a balanced design to prove to Zola and other critics of the Impressionists that the group was more than just daubers of paint blobs.

Vreeland’s book is full of the problems Renoir had of arranging 14 paid models in one place, keeping them together for two months in a small locale. He was under time pressure as the light that he wanted would only last until the end of summer. We learn also about French café society in the late 19th century, the problems painters had just getting materials together for such a large painting, and sometimes more than we want to know about the actual tubes of paint used.

Renoir had one other problem that Vreeland has a lot of fun with. He had declared, “I only want to paint women I love.” He falls desperately for his newest models, and he also tries to win his last subject back from her rich fiancé. With five women in the painting Renoir has many entangled romantic interests while trying to finish the painting before the soft summer light is gone.

There are, then, basically four levels of atmosphere swirling through the pages of this complex novel. Renoir must hurry to finish the painting. The 14 individuals appearing in it have separate and interconnected lives that make Renoir’s job more difficult. The spirit of la vie moderne, the new modes of living, thinking, and expressing, is causing tumult in the French art world. And we readers realize that Renoir has captured the life of these people forever.

That is the nature of art, whether written, sculpted or painted. The moments are frozen in time, yet Renoir’s brush, which makes all women lovely, shows us a free spirited, pleasant afternoon in a restaurant on an island in the Seine, downstream from Paris. There is an art collector, a war hero, a celebrated actress, and Renoir’s future wife among the 14 participants, and they are doing nothing but enjoying themselves.

Parisians were bursting away from the restrictions of the past and healing after the Franco-Prussian War. The Impressionists were part of this change, breaking from the stilted conventions of the Salon, personified by the horribly detailed historical paintings of Ernest Meissonier, who would spend ten years on Napoleon’s Battle of Freidland.

Renoir’s painting is only of a luncheon, but as Vermeer’s daughter realized for all paintings, this luncheon now has its own existence on a wall somewhere, and the people in it have been immortalized by Renoir’s daubs of paint.