Bal du moulin de la Galette

A Sunday at a Montmartre dance garden, painted at the size the Salon kept for history, and given to a crowd of working-class Parisians at four o’clock.

1. 1
   The dancing couple, dead center

   Middle ground, roughly the center of the canvas, slightly left

   Find them just behind the seated table group: a couple dancing, the woman in a pale pink dress with her back partly to us, her partner facing her. They are not the loudest figures in the picture, Renoir is subtler than that, but they’re the structural anchor. The painting is about dancing, and here, almost at dead center, is a couple dancing. Don’t try to name them; they’re part of the soft middle-ground crowd, deliberately unspecified, the type rather than the individual. Once you find them, the whole composition snaps into place around them.
2. 2
   The seated friends, front right

   Lower-right corner of the canvas

   A small round café table with a green wine bottle and glasses, three of Renoir’s friends around it, painted with noticeably more definition than the dancing crowd behind. The man in profile in the straw boater is the painter Norbert Goeneutte. The man facing us, leaning forward, is the writer Georges Rivière. The young woman leaning back against the bench in the striped pink-and-blue dress is Estelle Samary, a neighborhood model. These are Renoir’s actual Sunday afternoon, pinned down in the corner of the picture.
3. 3
   A coin of sunlight on a dark suit

   Lower foreground, on the back of the man in the dark jacket leaning into the picture

   Look for a clear pink-violet patch on the back of the dark suit, the same color as nothing else in the picture except other sunspots. Up close it looks like a bizarre mauve smear sitting on the cloth; from across a room it reads instantly as a coin of afternoon sunlight falling through leaves. This is the painting’s signature trick: dappled sun painted as discrete dabs of warm color, not as a general golden wash.
4. 4
   Lanterns waiting for nightfall

   Upper third of the canvas, strung between the trees on wires

   Round paper-globe lanterns are strung overhead between the acacia trees that close over the garden. They are unlit, it’s still daylight, mid-afternoon, but they’re set up to light the place when the sun goes down and the dancing carries into the evening. They are the only lighting fixtures on the canvas (no gas lamps on posts, no standing fixtures, just these paper globes on wires).
5. 5
   A pink-and-blue rhyme across the front

   Lower-right (seated) and lower-left (dancing)

   Two young women are wearing striped pink-and-blue dresses, mirrored across the bottom of the canvas. In the front right, Estelle Samary leans back against the bench in one. In the front left, Renoir’s model Margot dances in another. Renoir liked to compose with rhymes, colors and shapes echoed across a picture, and this is the most visible one in the painting.
6. 6
   No pure white, no hard black

   Everywhere across the canvas

   Scan the picture for pure white. You won’t find any. The "white" dresses are pale pink, lilac, and soft blue. Now scan for hard black shadows. Also gone, the "black" suits are warm grays and slightly-purpled blacks, and the shadows on the ground are warm, not cold. By keeping the extremes off the canvas, Renoir lets every color belong to the warm afternoon air.
7. 7
   Edges that blur on purpose

   The whole middle-ground crowd, especially the dancers receding into the trees

   Try to find a sharp drawn edge anywhere in the dancing crowd. There almost isn’t one. Faces are soft, dresses bleed into the air around them, the far crowd dissolves into atmosphere. This is deliberate, Renoir is painting the way the eye really sees a moving crowd in shifting light: you focus on one face at a time and the rest blurs at the edges of your attention.