Renoir | Le Moulin de la Galette

About Le Moulin de la Galette by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The Moulin de la Galette was an open-air dance garden on the hill of Montmartre, named after the two old windmills on the site and the little galettes sold there. On Sunday afternoons shop girls, seamstresses and clerks danced in the yard under strings of gas globes. In 1876 Renoir took rooms in the rue Cortot, a few minutes' walk away, and spent the summer painting the place on a canvas 1.3 by 1.75 metres.

The crowd is made of his friends, not hired models. The painters Norbert Goeneutte and Pierre-Franc Lamy and the writer Georges Rivière sit at the table on the right. The girl leaning back on the bench in the blue and pink striped dress is Estelle Samary. Margot Legrand dances at the left with the Cuban painter Pedro Vidal de Solares y Cárdenas. Sunlight comes down through acacia leaves in loose patches and falls across faces, straw hats and the black cloth of the men's coats.

Renoir showed it at the third Impressionist exhibition in April 1877. Gustave Caillebotte owned it from 1879; on his death in 1894 it went to the French State in lieu of death duties, hung at the Musée du Luxembourg from 1896 and at the Louvre from 1929, and moved to the Musée d'Orsay in 1986.

Own a hand-painted Le Moulin de la Galette

The sunlight in this picture was painted last. The coats, the ground and the crowd went down first; the patches of sun that fall across them — pale pink, cream, blue-white — were put on afterwards, as separate touches over paint that was already there. That order is the whole reason the light looks like light lying on a shoulder rather than a pattern woven into the cloth. Critics hostile to Impressionism seized on exactly this and said Renoir's dappling made his figures look stained and mouldy. In a printed reproduction there is no order at all: every colour in the image is laid down in one pass, nothing sits above anything else, and the sun patches sink into the coats and become the blotches those critics described. Painted by hand in oils, the dappling goes on last, on top, in the sequence Renoir used.