The bequest that finally took it inside

When Caillebotte died in February 1894, at the age of 45, he had been quietly preparing for years. He had a will, and the will gave his Impressionist collection to France. The death itself was sudden and physical: pulmonary congestion — a sudden, severe fluid build-up in the lungs — caught him while he was working in his garden at Petit-Gennevilliers, the suburban riverside property where he had moved to paint and to grow flowers. He went down in the garden and didn’t recover. He was 45.

That bequest sounds simple. In practice it nearly broke. The state was, at this point in the 1890s, still very much the state of the Salon — of the conservative academic taste that had been rejecting and bad-hanging the Impressionists for two decades. To be handed a free gift of sixty-seven major Impressionist canvases by a young dead collector who insisted, in the will, that they be hung in the national museums was, for the establishment, somewhere between an insult and a public-relations problem. The negotiation dragged for years. The state’s representatives haggled over which works it would accept, eventually agreeing in 1894 to take a portion of the bequest (the full story of that fight belongs to the movement read — it’s the big set-piece of the whole institutional history of Impressionism). The Caillebotte bequest, including Bal du moulin de la Galette, was finally accepted and entered the national collections by 1896.

Where they put it was the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris. The Luxembourg, at the time, was the state’s museum of contemporary art — the working museum for living and recently-dead artists, separate from the eternal masterworks at the Louvre across the river. The rule was a kind of waiting room: a work entered the Luxembourg, and then, a decade or so after the artist’s death, if its reputation held, it might be “consecrated” — promoted across town to the Louvre. Bal du moulin de la Galette went into the Luxembourg in 1896, where it stayed for over thirty years. Renoir died in 1919; in 1929, ten years after his death and right on the standard schedule, the painting was transferred to the Louvre. Consecrated.

It didn’t stay at the Louvre forever. In 1947, after the upheavals of the Second World War, the Impressionist collection at the Louvre was moved across the Tuileries Gardens into its own dedicated home, the Jeu de Paume (an old indoor real-tennis hall, on the corner of the Tuileries, converted into a museum). For nearly forty years the Jeu de Paume was where you went in Paris to see Impressionism. Bal du moulin de la Galette hung there. And then, in 1986, the French state opened a new museum specifically for 19th-century art — the Musée d’Orsay, built inside the magnificent old Beaux-Arts railway station on the left bank of the Seine — and the entire Impressionist collection moved with it. Renoir’s dance has hung there ever since. Its accession number, if you ever want to find it in the d’Orsay’s catalogue, is RF 2739.

Now, an important detail, because it’s the one most people get wrong. The painting on the d’Orsay wall is the primary version, the one we’ve been describing through this whole read — about 4 ft 3¾ in by 5 ft 9 in, the one Renoir made in 1876, the one Caillebotte bought in 1879 and left to France in 1894. But there is also a smaller version, roughly 2 ft 6¾ in by 3 ft 9 in, of the same composition. Its status is contested. It has been variously catalogued, by different scholars, as (a) Renoir’s preparatory study for the big canvas, (b) a later replica painted by Renoir himself, or (c) a copy by another hand. Nobody agrees. Phrase it as the museum world does: “a smaller version exists, attributed to Renoir but contested.”

Wherever it came from, the smaller version had its own dramatic afterlife. It eventually entered the great American collection of John Hay Whitney, the publisher and ambassador, and on his estate’s sale at Sotheby’s New York in May 1990 it sold for $78.1 million — a price that, at the time, was a world record for any painting at auction. The buyer was reported as a private Swiss collection, where the painting has stayed since. It is not in the Barnes Foundation, the famous Pennsylvania collection that holds an extraordinary number of Renoirs; the Barnes does not own any version of Bal du moulin de la Galette. That misattribution circulates, especially online, and should be refused on contact.

So sit with the arc of this object. A 35-year-old broke painter rents a small studio in Montmartre. For weeks of Sundays in 1876 he carries a canvas the size that history paintings get up the hill to a working-class dance garden under a windmill. He puts his named friends in it, finishes it in the studio, signs it lower right Renoir. 76, and hangs it the next April in a rented apartment on the rue Le Peletier where some critics call it sloppy and one of his friends defends it in print. He carries it home unsold. Two years later another friend writes him a private check that keeps him in paint. That friend dies young, fifteen years after that, struck down in his own garden, and the painting passes to the French state against the state’s own reluctance. Then it works its way slowly across the museums of Paris — Luxembourg, then Louvre, then Jeu de Paume, then the d’Orsay, where it has hung since 1986: a six-foot Sunday afternoon at a working-class dance garden, with its pink-violet sunspots and its two pink-and-blue striped dresses and its lanterns waiting to be lit, that never quite ends.