Bal du moulin de la Galette

1876

Oil on canvas, 131.5 × 176.5 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris

A crowded open-air dance on Montmartre, painted by Renoir in 1876. It gave an ordinary city pleasure the size of a Salon picture and is usually ranked first among his mid-1870s works.

Sunlight through the trees falls in patches on hats, jackets and dusty ground, in quick, broken touches. Impressionist painters often favored dappled light like this, filtered through leaves.
Shown at the third Impressionist exhibition in April 1877.
Friends posed among the dancers, but the subject is the whole crowd, not one figure.
Critics disliked its blurred look, an effect many now see as the point.
Gustave Caillebotte bought it by 1879; his bequest brought it to the French state in 1896.

The Moulin de la Galette was a popular dance garden on the Butte Montmartre, at the northern edge of Paris. The museum stresses the crowd's cheerful mood.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain