Dance at the Moulin de la Galette
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 to 1919) · 1876
A Sunday afternoon dance in the open air on the hill of Montmartre. The Moulin de la Galette was a working windmill turned into a cheap dance hall where shop girls, seamstresses, students and young artists came to drink, flirt and waltz under the acacia trees. Renoir lived nearby and painted the scene almost life size, filling it with his friends. In the foreground a group sits around a table with glasses of grenadine, and beyond them couples turn on the dance floor beneath a string of gas lamps. The whole picture hums with talk, music and the pleasure of being young in Paris.
What holds it together is light. Sunlight falls through the leaves and lands in soft patches on the dancers' backs, on the straw hats and on the ground, and Renoir paints those patches as pale blue, lilac and yellow rather than as simple brightness. Look at the young man's dark jacket in the foreground and you will find it is full of colour. Faces are built with a few feathery strokes, edges are lost in the glow, and the crowd dissolves into a shimmer towards the back. Contemporaries complained that the figures looked as if they were covered in spots. Renoir was showing how the eye actually experiences dappled light, and that is what makes the painting feel alive.
Renoir showed it at the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877, where it was recognised at once as one of the movement's masterpieces. The painter Gustave Caillebotte bought it, and when he died in 1894 he left his collection to the French state, a gift that gave the nation its first great group of Impressionist works. A smaller version, painted by Renoir at the same time, was sold at auction in 1990 for one of the highest prices ever paid for a painting at the time. The man in the straw hat at the centre table, back to us, is Renoir's friend and fellow painter Norbert Goeneutte.
Did You Know? Renoir carried the huge canvas up the hill of Montmartre each day with his friends' help so that he could paint the dance on the spot.
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