Sunday at the windmill

Picture a hill on the north edge of Paris, the kind of hill you climb on a Sunday afternoon when you want to get out of the city without leaving it. At the top sits a working windmill — an actual mill, with sails — and tucked beside it, in an open-air garden ringed with trees, hundreds of young people are dancing. Round paper-globe lanterns hang in the branches overhead, strung on wires between the trees, not yet lit because it is still daylight. The band is playing. The wine is cheap. The house specialty — the galette, a flat round biscuit-cake baked from the mill’s own flour and sold with a glass of milk for almost nothing — is laid out at the counter. The crowd is mostly working-class: laundresses, seamstresses, clerks, students, the sons and daughters of the carpenters and stonemasons who live on the hill. Mixed in among them is a thin scattering of broke young painters from the neighborhood, watching.

This is Montmartre in 1876. Not yet the cliché tourist Montmartre of Sacré-Cœur and accordion players — the big white basilica at the top of the hill hasn’t been built yet — but the real working Montmartre, still half a village, only recently absorbed into the city itself. Paris had eaten its surrounding villages in 1860, swallowing Montmartre and a clutch of other communes into its expanded city limits, and the hill was now technically the 18th arrondissement (one of the twenty numbered districts the new Paris was divided into, spiraling out from the center like a snail shell). Technically inside Paris; in practice still its own place. Working windmills still ground flour up there. Small farms still grew cabbages. The rents were cheap. The light was good. Painters lived there because painters could afford to.

The dance garden in question was called the Moulin de la Galette — literally “the windmill of the galette” — and it was a real, working family business that the Debray family, the local millers, had turned into something more profitable than flour alone. The Debrays in fact owned two windmills on this stretch of the Butte: the older Blute-Fin (built 1622, the tall sailed mill that you can see in the painting itself), and the Radet (built 1717, a few yards downhill). They kept milling, and they spun the site into a guinguette — French for “open-air café and dance hall.” (The word originally meant a cheap suburban tavern selling the bad local wine of the same name.) A guinguettewas a Sunday-afternoon institution: not a nightclub, not a salon, but the cheap outdoor place ordinary Parisians went to drink wine, eat the galette the place had been named after, and dance to a small band, in daylight, in a garden, with their friends. The Debrays’ was the most famous of them.

Sunday afternoons mattered, and here is the part that’s easy to skate past: this whole world of cheap mass leisure was new. Two changes had only just made it possible. First, the railways— the great new train lines fanning out from the central Paris stations across the 1850s and 1860s — had stitched the city together internally and pulled the suburbs in close, turning a Sunday trip from a logistical project into a casual outing. Second, and more quietly, the working day was shifting: by the 1870s the French half-day Saturday and the free Sunday were becoming a normal expectation for clerks and shop assistants in Paris, even if factory workers were still some way from it. A clerk in 1830 worked from dark to dark. A clerk in 1876 had a Sunday off, a few francs in his pocket, and a railway-and-omnibus network that would put him at the bottom of the Butte Montmartre by lunchtime. From there it was a walk uphill. Leisure, in the modern sense — the idea that ordinary people had whole days that were their own — was being invented in real time, on the ground, in places exactly like this one.

Now enter the painter. Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) was 35 years old in 1876 and broke. Don’t write him in your head as the celebrated Renoir of the late portraits and the warm-honey bathers; in 1876 he was a struggling thirtysomething painter whose work the official annual exhibition kept hanging badly or rejecting outright. His main patron was a young fellow painter named Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894), independently wealthy and quietly buying his friends’ work to keep them in paint and rent. Renoir had been painting in and around Montmartre for years, but in 1875 he made a deliberate move. He rented a studio nearby on the rue Cortot, a small street just downhill from the Moulin de la Galette, and he rented it on purpose — to work on a single big picture about the dance garden up the hill.

That picture is the one we’re about to look at. It is over five feet wide — almost six — and it has named friends of Renoir’s in it, sitting at a table, dancing in the crowd. The 35-year-old broke painter is going to put the windmill, the lanterns, the pink-and-blue dresses, the dappled afternoon sun, and the whole new Sunday of the new city on a canvas the size that the establishment reserved for the deaths of kings. Hold that scale in mind. It’s the quiet provocation of the entire picture.