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Pierre-Auguste Renoir · 1876
painting
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Renoir paints a Sunday dance at the Moulin de la Galette in Montmartre, where local people gathered to eat, drink and dance. Shown publicly in 1877, the picture belongs to the Musée d’Orsay.
Dappled light breaks across the crowd’s clothes and faces. The young men at the foreground table include Renoir’s friends. Follow the patches of light between them and the dancers: they give a crowded gathering its visual rhythm.
1876
Musée d'Orsay
The Moulin de la Galette stood on the Butte Montmartre, then still a village-like hilltop on the edge of Paris. On Sunday afternoons it opened its garden to anyone who wanted to dance, drink and eat the galettes it was named for, drawing shopgirls, clerks and artists alike.
Renoir filled the foreground with people he actually knew rather than paid studio models. The young men drinking at the tables on the right were his own circle of friends, brought along to pose for an afternoon.
Renoir finished the painting in 1876 and put it before the public the following year, when it was still a fairly new thing for artists to exhibit outside the official Salon.
The painting now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the museum built for exactly this generation of nineteenth-century French painting.
1876. Renoir set up to paint a real Sunday afternoon at the Moulin de la Galette on the Butte Montmartre, gathering his own friends around the tables instead of hiring models.
He worked to catch the sunlight itself, breaking through the trees into small moving spots of colour across the dancers below.
1877. The finished painting was shown to the public for the first time.
It eventually found its way to the Musée d'Orsay, where it hangs today.
Instead of painting even, studio-like daylight, Renoir broke sunlight into small separate patches of colour scattered across the scene, so the light itself seems to move.
