Moulin de la Galette, Where Renoir Painted His Dance

This windmill and dance hall is the setting of Renoir's masterpiece, Bal du moulin de la Galette. To appreciate the painting, it helps to know how Impressionism came about.

Go back to 1863. To make it as a painter in France, you had to win a prize at the Salon, an exhibition run by the Academy, the country's most powerful circle of painters. But the Salon recognized only works painted according to strict rules, with little room for variety. Frustrated young painters held their own show, the Salon des Refusés, for rejected works. Among the paintings on view was Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, and viewers were scandalized: a naked woman staring straight at the audience was thought vulgar and offensive to public morals. Still, the young painters took inspiration from it. They didn't have to paint only what the Academy wanted, and so Monet, Renoir, Sisley and others began painting in a new way. Where the art of the day stressed precise rules and form, they painted the colors of changing light just as they felt them.

When Monet exhibited Impression, Sunrise, a newspaper critic named Louis Leroy sneered that you couldn't see any forms at all, that everything was distorted, and that nothing of substance remained, only an impression. The young painters took the jab and ran with it, calling their style of capturing the feeling of light "Impressionism." Renoir, Monet, Sisley and others went on to develop an art that valued light and color over form, and masterpieces like Bal du moulin de la Galette followed.

That painting is praised for capturing the drowsy light of afternoon. Moulin de la Galette was originally a dance hall with an open roof, so sunlight spilled in here and there. On Sunday afternoons, young Parisians gathered to dance and chat in the sun. A canvas this large couldn't be finished in a few hours, because the sun moves and the light and colors change. So Renoir invited his friends to pose at the same time every day. He rented a studio nearby and, for nearly a year and a half, came at the same hour, producing countless sketches and studies.

The painting beautifully renders sunlight filtering through tangled tree branches. Shown at the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877, it won wide acclaim for its delicate treatment of light. This is where the work that made Renoir shine was born.