Unterhaltung

The two people here knew each other well. The man is the painter Frederic Cordey, who worked alongside Renoir in Montmartre, and the woman is Marguerite Legrand, called Margot, one of the models he used constantly in the late 1870s. She is the woman dancing in the foreground of the Moulin de la Galette, painted two years before this. Renoir worked her face and hands in thin parallel strokes and kept black almost entirely out of the canvas, laying in the dark passages with deep blue instead. A few months after he finished it, Margot fell ill. Renoir wrote letter after letter to Doctor Paul Gachet, the physician who looked after several of the Impressionists and who would later take in Van Gogh at Auvers, begging him to come and treat her. She died in February 1879.