Bal du moulin de la Galette, 1876
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Oil on canvas · 131 x 175 cm
Dappled sunlight falls across a crowded Montmartre dance garden.
Dappled sunlight falls through the trees onto Parisians dancing and chatting at an open-air Montmartre dance garden. Renoir dissolves the whole crowd into flickering light and colour — the very picture of nineteenth-century joie de vivre.
What you're looking at
The light is doing something no painter had quite dared: sunlight falling through leaves onto faces and clothes in loose blue-violet patches, so people appear dappled and half-dissolved. Critics complained the figures looked mouldy. Renoir carried the canvas up the hill to Montmartre and back most days to paint it on the spot, and the dancers are friends who agreed to pose.
On a Frame TV
About 1.35:1. The clean crop takes the trees above and the foreground table below, so the matted file suits it better. Bright and busy with soft contrast — good in a lit room, and better on a big screen than a small one.
Department of Paintings of the Louvre · Visit it in Paris →
- 4K master file (3840px+)
- Samsung Frame TV–ready crop
- Phone wallpaper crop
- Printable art card
Public domain · one .zip, no sign-up
More like this
Other works in the collection, starting with Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
