A painting a day · No. 27 of 38
Bal du moulin de la Galette
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919)
1876 · Oil on canvas · Musée d'Orsay, Paris
The story
A Sunday afternoon at an open-air dance hall in Montmartre. Renoir carried the canvas there and used his friends as models.
Look closer
- Patches of sunlight through the trees fall on jackets, hats and the ground.
- No one is posing: people talk, dance and turn away.
- The faces in the back melt into the light.
Did you know
A smaller version sold at auction in New York in 1990 for $78.1 million — at the time one of the highest prices ever paid for a painting.
Why we can show it
Pierre-Auguste Renoir died in 1919. UK copyright lasts for the artist’s life plus 70 years, so even under today’s rules this painting would have been free for anyone to show since 1990. The photograph is a faithful copy of a flat work, which creates no new copyright. We do not store the picture: it comes from Wikimedia Commons each time it is needed. More on this.