A Corner of the Moulin de la Galette

Lautrec takes a corner of the Moulin de la Galette, the dance hall up on Montmartre, where people stand and sit around the tables. A woman in a black coat stands with her hands in her pockets beside a white table and two glasses. In front, a woman in a grey-green coat and a hat with a big green bow sits turned away, and a man with a moustache looks past both of them. It is painted on cardboard, and it has travelled. At a sale in Paris in 1906 it was catalogued simply as a cabaret interior and bought for Otto Gerstenberg, a Berlin insurance magnate. His daughter lent it to an exhibition in Copenhagen in 1936, and the national gallery there stored it for her through the Second World War. Much of the Gerstenberg collection left in Berlin was lost in 1945, some of it taken to the Soviet Union. In 1950 this picture passed through a New York gallery to the collector Chester Dale, who left it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1963.