Description
Dappled sunlight falls through the trees onto a crowded open-air dance floor: couples turn together at the left, a seated group shares a table strewn with glasses in the foreground, and a haze of hats, dark suits and pale dresses fills the space back toward strings of lamps. Children and onlookers stand among the dancers, and everywhere the light breaks into small patches of blue-white on hair, shoulders and the ground.
This is Renoir’s smaller reprise of the Moulin de la Galette dance, painted in 1876, its canvas (78 by 114 cm) more compact than the large version now in Paris but built from the same crowded, sun-flecked composition. The print is tuned to keep those small dabs of light distinct across the crowd, since the picture’s whole effect depends on hundreds of tiny separate touches rather than a few broad ones.
