Paint the Sunday at the size of a king

Start with the canvas, because the first fact about this picture is its size.

Bal du moulin de la Galette is about 4 ft 3¾ in tall by 5 ft 9 in wide. That doesn’t sound enormous on the page; it is enormous in a room. Imagine a canvas wider than a tall person is tall, mounted on a stretcher, then imagine carrying that out of a small Paris studio and back. Now imagine what such a canvas was for by the rules of the time. A canvas this big was a history painting— the grandest category of subject in the academic hierarchy: ancient battles, the death of Caesar, mythology, biblical drama, the great noble themes. Sunday afternoons did not get six feet of canvas. Renoir’s first decision, before he ever loaded a brush, was to take history-painting scale and aim it at a dance.

And not just any dance. Look again at who is on the floor. These are not aristocrats and not the haute-bourgeoisie of the new Paris boulevards; these are seamstresses, milliners, laundresses, shop clerks, and the journeymen of Montmartre’s workshops, in their cheap Sunday best, holding each other under a working mill on their one day off. The provocation isn’t only that Renoir scaled up a leisure subject. It’s that he scaled up the leisure of a class that history painting had never depicted at six feet wide. Salon canvases of this size went to gods, generals, and kings. Renoir gave the size to a working girl in a striped dress and her partner in a straw hat. That substitution is the political content of the picture, and it’s deliberate.

The second decision was where to work. He rented his small studio on rue Cortot in Montmartre in 1875 specifically so the dance garden would be a short walk away. Then he did something the plein air painters — plein air is French for “open air,” meaning painting outdoors in front of the real light rather than from sketches and memory in a studio — were starting to do as a method: he carried his canvas, his palette, and his easel up the hill on Sunday afternoons and painted at the guinguette itself, on the spot, with the dance going on around him. Across weeks of Sundays, sitting in the garden under the trees, he worked from life: real faces, real hats, the real fall of leaf-shadow on real shoulders. (Be careful with the legend here. The romantic story that he painted the whole thing en plein air in the garden, every brushstroke laid down outdoors, is partly true and partly tidied up. He painted on siteover many sessions; he carried the canvas back to the rue Cortot studio and finished it indoors. “Painted partly on site, finished in the studio” is the honest phrasing. A big crowd scene with dozens of figures was never going to be wholly resolved in a noisy garden full of dancers.)

The third decision was the cast. Renoir didn’t try to paint anonymous strangers; he painted the people he knew. The figures sitting at the small round café table in the front-right of the picture are his friends, named in his own and others’ accounts of the work. The man in the dark suit and straw boater (the stiff flat-brimmed summer hat), seen in profile facing right with his arm draped over the chair, is the painter Norbert Goeneutte (some sources read this seated figure instead as another painter, Pierre-Franc Lamy — they look similar in this group, and the identification isn’t airtight). Opposite him, facing us and leaning forward toward the young woman, is the writer Georges Rivière, Renoir’s friend and the chronicler who would later write up this whole circle. The young woman herself, leaning back against the bench in a striped pink-and-blue dress, is Estelle Samary, a young model from the neighborhood. And in the dancing crowd around them are more of the regulars — the painters Henri Gervex, Frédéric Cordey, Pierre-Franc Lamy, the journalist Paul Lhote, and at lower left, a favorite Renoir model named Margot (Marguerite Legrand), in another striped pink-and-blue dress, dancing with a Cuban-painter friend called Pedro Vidal de Solares y Cárdenas. Most of the dancing crowd in the middle distance is notindividually named — it’s a soft crowd, faceless on purpose — but the front of the picture is a portrait of Renoir’s actual Sunday afternoons.

And now the trick. The hardest problem in this painting, the one Renoir solved on the spot in front of the dancers and that nobody had quite solved before him, is dappled light. Dappled light is what happens when sunlight comes down through leaves and branches: the leaves break the light up into discrete round patches, so that what falls on the people below isn’t a smooth wash of sun but a scattered constellation of bright spots, with cool shadow in between. Stand under a tree on a sunny afternoon and look at your own arm and you’ll see it — small round coins of warm light, edges soft, all over you. The traditional way to paint this in 1876 was to fudge it: a general golden glow over everything, the shadows toned down, the spots ironed out. Renoir refused. He painted the spots themselves, as discrete dabs of warm pink, lilac, pale violet, and straw-yellow, sitting visibly on top of the cool gray-blue of the shadow. He matched the bouncing color of the real garden — not the idea of sunlight, but the actual messy patchwork it makes on a jacket.

Look at the man in the dark suit in the lower foreground, the one with his back partly to us. There is a clear pink-violet patch on his backthat is the same color as nothing else in the picture except other sunspots — it doesn’t match his suit, it doesn’t match the wall behind him, it doesn’t match his neighbor’s hat. It’s a discrete dab of color, sitting on the dark cloth, that reads from across a room as a coin of afternoon sun on the man’s shoulder. Up close it looks like a bizarre mauve smear. Across the room it looks like sunshine through a tree. That mismatch — paint that is doing one thing close up and a completely different thing at distance — is the engine of the whole picture.

The palette is the other half of the answer. Look at what isn’t there: there is almost no pure white anywhere on the canvas, and there are almost no hard black shadows. The dresses that read as white are actually pale pink, lilac, and pale blue. The “black” suits are warm grays and soft, slightly-purpled blacks. The shadows on the ground are warm, not cold. By keeping pure white and pure black out of the picture, Renoir lets every color belongto the warm afternoon air — there are no jarring extremes pulling the eye out of the garden. Everything is pitched in the warm middle, which is exactly the register of a real sunlit Sunday afternoon at four o’clock. Polish has been refused on purpose; the soft, blurred edges of dancers and faces are the trick that says “this is what a crowded garden in moving light actually looks like, not the catalogue of who is wearing what.”

He signed it lower right: Renoir. 76.