MURA · THE COLLECTION · PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette

Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Bal du moulin de la Galette) is an oil painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir from 1876, showing a Sunday afternoon at a dance garden in Montmartre. It measures 131 by 175 centimetres and belongs to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, inventory number RF 2739.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir · 1876 · Oil on canvas · Impressionism · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

A Paris afternoon fills with dancing, conversation and light filtering through trees. Wikipedia describes a typical Sunday at the original Moulin de la Galette, where working-class Parisians came to dance, drink and eat galettes. Georges Rivière recorded who sat for it: Estelle Samary in a striped dress, the painters Norbert Goeneutte, Pierre-Franc Lamy and Henri Gervex, and the Cuban painter Pedro Vidal de Solares y Cardenas dancing with the model Marguerite Legrand.

How it was painted

Renoir, born in Limoges in 1841, lived close to the Butte Montmartre at the time. Wikipedia's account of the painting says he set up a studio in an abandoned cottage with a garden on the rue Cortot and worked on the picture on the spot, with the wind making the canvas hard to hold. His biography on Wikipedia calls it an open-air scene crowded with people at a popular dance garden near where he lived, and treats it as a summary of his Impressionist style in light and colour. Two years earlier he had helped organise the first Impressionist exhibition of April 1874.

A smaller version, 78 by 114 centimetres, also exists. It was sold on 17 May 1990 for 78 million dollars to Ryoei Saito and is believed to be in a Swiss private collection.

Where it went

The large canvas was bought by the painter and collector Gustave Caillebotte, who owned it from 1879 until his death in 1894, when it passed to the French state with his bequest. It hung in the Musée du Luxembourg from 1896 to 1929, then in the Louvre, and was transferred to the Musée d'Orsay in 1986. The reproduction used here is the Google Art Project file on Wikimedia Commons, which records the Orsay inventory number.

Why it is in Mura

It belongs to the Impressionist Life collection with a luminous mood: a crowd at ease under dappled light, the sort of picture a room can share.