Bal du moulin de la Galette

Renoir painted this in 1876 at an open-air dance hall on the hill of Montmartre, then a scruffy edge of Paris where an old windmill, the moulin, had been turned into a Sunday dancing garden. Working people came up on their day off to dance under the trees, and Renoir wanted the exact feeling of sunlight coming down through leaves onto a moving crowd. Those dappled spots of light on the jackets and faces looked unfinished to critics used to smooth surfaces. He set up nearby and used his own friends as the dancers and drinkers, so the laughing faces are real people he knew. Look at the couple in the foreground and the man in the striped jacket at the left, half turned toward us, as if we had just walked up to the table.