Pierre Auguste Renoir, Moulin de la Galette

Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) focused most of his attention on figure painting, producing mostly images of the upper middle class at leisure. When he met Monet at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1862, he was working as a figure painter. Monet encouraged him to lighten his palette and to paint outdoors, and by the mid 1870s Renoir was combining a spontaneous handling of natural light with animated figural compositions. In his Moulin de la Galette, for example, Renoir depicts crowds dancing in dappled sunlight that falls through the trees.

The Moulin de la Galette (the “Pancake Mill”), in the Montmartre section of Paris, was an old-fashioned Sunday afternoon dance hall, which opened its outdoor courtyard during good weather. In this painting, Renoir has glamorized the working-class clientele of the dance hall by placing his artist friends and their models in their midst. These attractive people are shown in attitudes of relaxed congeniality, smiling, dancing, and chatting. He underscores the innocence of their flirtations by including children in the painting in the lower left, while emphasizing the ease of their relations through the relaxed informality of the scene. The overall mood is knit together by sunlight falling through the trees and Renoir’s soft brushwork weaving blues and purples through the crowd and around the canvas. This idyllic image of a carefree time and place encapsulates Renoir’s idea of the essence of art: “For me a picture should be a pleasant thing, joyful and pretty- yes pretty! There are quite enough unpleasant things in life without the need for us to manufacture more.”^[1]