1008

Theme:                                   Ball at the Moulin de la Galette (1876)

Artist:                                     Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Dimensions:                            3.15’X 2.4’

Material:                                 100% silk

Line Counts:                            200

KPSI:                                      278 

Status:                                    Order to produce

About  the painting and the artist

Men in top hats and boaters and women in pretty dresses chatter, drink and dance under the blowing lights of this famous Parisian dance hall. Renoir loved his subject and painted it a number of times, reproducing the patterns made by the light as it catches the figures moving around the floor.  Many of Renoir’s friends acted as models for the dancers.  The couple in the middle distance are his favorite model Marguerite Legrand and the Spanish painter Don Pedro de Solares y Cardenas.  Like all Impressionists, Renoir painted from life as he sat in the dance hall; his friends assisted him each day in moving his canvases back and forth to his studio.  At the time the Moulin de la Galette was painted, Renoir was working very closely with Claude Monet. They spent much time painting outdoors, capturing the fleeting effects of sunlight as it scatters across a landscape. With his ‘rainbow palette’, Renoir painted over 600 canvases of women, children flowers and fields.