Dance at the Moulin de la Galette

Dance at the Moulin de la Galette
Artist: Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Oil painting on canvas; Size: 131x175cm; Louvre, Paris.

Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (Bal du moulin de la Galette) (Dance at Le moulin de la Galette) is an 1876 a famous painting by French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. It is one of Impressionism's most celebrated masterpieces. The painting depicts a typical Sunday afternoon at Moulin de la Galette in the district of Montmartre in Paris. Like other works of Renoir's early maturity, Bal du moulin de la Galette is a typically Impressionist snapshot of real life. It shows a richness of form, a fluidity of brush stroke, and a flickering light.
From 1879 to 1894 the painting was in the collection of the French painter Gustave Caillebotte; when he died it became the property of the French Republic as payment for death duties. From 1896 to 1929 the painting hung in the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris. From 1929 it hung in the Musée du Louvre until it was transferred to the Musée d'Orsay in 1986.
Renoir painted the modern life of the city, its pastimes and its meeting places, recording the scene with immediacy and working, as he liked to put it, like a "cork that bobs on the surface and is carried along by the current" or like a "workman of painting." Seamstresses and their friends modeled for the painting, on which Renoir often worked in the garden on via Cortot , getting his companions to help him move the large canvas. During his Impressionist period - this work dates from 1876 - his palette was very simple: white lead, three shades of yellow, two of green and two of blue, raw Sienna, vermilion and madder lake, without the black that, after his trip to Italy, he was to call "the king of colors."