The third show, not the Salon

In April 1877, the painting went on the wall.

The Impressionists were by this point already three years into running their own counter-shows to the Salon — the state-run annual exhibition that was effectively the only door into a French painting career, with a jury of conservative academics deciding who got in. (The 1874 founding story — the Nadar studio, the Monet sunrise, the critic Louis Leroy turning “Impressionists” into a sneering label that the painters then wore on purpose — belongs to the movement read; this picture sits inside its third year, not its first.) By 1877 they were calling themselves Impressionists on purpose, and they were holding their third exhibition.

That third exhibition opened in April 1877 in a rented apartment at 6 rue Le Peletier in Paris, and Bal du moulin de la Galette was one of its centerpieces. Renoir hung it as one of his major entries. (Mark this carefully, because the older story used to say the painting “first showed at the 1877 Salon.” That is wrong, and it gets repeated even in respectable books, so it’s worth flagging. The picture was at the breakaway 3rd Impressionist Exhibitionof April 1877 — not the official Salon, the establishment show whose jury had been giving the Impressionists a hard time for years. Different show, different room, different politics.)

The reception was, predictably, split. Some critics were scornful. The picture was too unfinished, too loose, the figures too blurred, the light too strange. The discrete pink-violet sunspots on dark suits, which we just spent a chapter admiring, struck a number of reviewers as plain wrong: paint dabs in colors no cloth ever was, smeared on cloth where no light could plausibly fall. (The complaint isn’t completely silly. Up close, those spots do look like errors. You have to step back to see them resolve into sunshine. Some critics didn’t step back.) Other reviewers were delighted. Georges Rivière — the writer leaning forward in the front-right corner of the picture itself, Renoir’s friend and built-in PR department — wrote a glowing defense in his short-lived journal L’Impressionniste, calling the painting a page out of real life and praising exactly the dappled light and atmospheric softness that the hostile critics were calling sloppy. The split — half scorn, half delight — was the standard temperature of any Impressionist work in the 1870s, and Bal du moulin de la Galettesat near the center of the year’s argument.

Now the part of the story that matters longest. The painting did not sell on the floor of the exhibition. Renoir was still broke after the show closed, still struggling for income, still leaning on the small group of patrons who kept buying his work. Two years later, in 1879, Gustave Caillebotte — the wealthy young engineer-painter we met in Chapter 1, Renoir’s friend and quiet patron — bought Bal du moulin de la Galettedirectly from him. The price isn’t securely documented, but the meaning of the purchase is. Caillebotte was buying his struggling friend a year of breathing room, and he was assembling, deliberately, a private collection of his Impressionist friends’ work — Renoirs, Monets, Pissarros, Sisleys, Cézannes — that he intended to give to the French State on his death. He was building the future of the Luxembourg’s modern-art collection one canvas at a time, using his own money to drag the Impressionists onto the museum walls that the Salon would never give them.

It’s a key point, and easy to misunderstand. Caillebotte did not commission the picture. Renoir made it on his own initiative, hauled his canvas up the hill to the guinguette on his own Sundays, finished it in his own studio, and exhibited it in April 1877. Three years passed. Only in 1879did Caillebotte step in and buy the finished, exhibited, already-existing painting from his friend — a private sale, after the fact, to keep Renoir in rent. Anything that says Caillebotte ordered the picture or paid for it up front is wrong. He was a collector and patron, not a commissioner.

So at the end of the show’s run, this is where the picture stood: hung in a rented apartment in Paris through April 1877, called sloppy by some critics and brilliant by others, then carried home unsold and quietly hung on Renoir’s own wall until the day, two years later, when Caillebotte’s offer arrived and the painting moved across town to a private collection that already had several of its neighbors. From there — but here we get ahead of ourselves. The 1879 purchase is the hinge. What it opens onto is the long afterlife in the museums.