The 1876 oil on canvas painting 'Le Moulin de la Galette,' measuring 4'4" by 5'9", is one of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's most celebrated and impressive works, exemplifying his early impressionist style. This painting showcases many of the key objectives, qualities, and techniques of impressionist art.
Although Renoir depicted beautiful and joyful scenes—he once remarked, "Why shouldn't art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world."—nineteenth-century impressionism represented a controversial departure from the conventions of the French academy.
As the guardian of French art standards, the academy prioritized historical and religious subjects. It valued formally composed scenes, created with meticulous and preferably invisible brushstrokes. The academy expected figures to be clearly defined, and colors to be restrained, often muted by varnish.
Influenced by Delacroix, the experimental brushwork and spontaneous landscapes of Constable and Turner, the outdoor scenes of the Barbizon school, and the colorful, candidly composed Japanese ukiyo-e prints, Renoir and his fellow impressionists painted new subjects with a new look. They aimed to depict fresh landscapes and ordinary people in bright, joyful situations.
Most importantly, they aspired for a spontaneous, and realistic way of depicting the world, reflecting how humans truly perceive the ever-changing visual information. They wanted to capture the ephemeral nature of the world, movement, and the dynamic interplay of light, color, and shadows in a scene.
Despite the French academy standards, the world isn’t frozen in time. Human visual perception involves processing ever-changing, limited, and ambiguous visual information. Our eyes don’t see everything in focus. We concentrate on certain details while perceiving others only peripherally. We notice hints and vague shapes of objects. A second glance at something that caught our peripheral attention reveals it has changed.
Sharing an interest in landscapes and contemporary daily life, the impressionists painted outdoors. This required quick work and a focus on essentials, aligning perfectly with the impressionist approach.
Color was an essential aspect of impressionism. Influenced by new scientific color theories from chemists and physicists, Renoir and the impressionists experimented with color and its application. They discovered that placing colors side by side, instead of mixing them, produced different visual effects. For example, they created the perception of gray by placing complementary non-gray colors side by side, rather than using gray paint. This side-by-side color technique, which appears blurred together from a distance, is best exemplified by the later pointillist works of Georges Seurat.
Renoir and Monet, friends who frequently painted together outdoors, discovered that shadows are not brown or black as traditionally depicted in art. Instead, shadows reflect the color of the objects creating them. for example, shadows on snow often appear blue. Impressionists avoided using black paint because they realized that true black is rarely found in the natural world.
Photography profoundly influenced impressionism. Aiming to depict real-life scenes, impressionism often mimicked snapshot photos with natural, unposed, and unbalanced compositions, and figures cropped at the borders. Although Le Moulin de la Galette was carefully composed using Renoir’s friends as models, it closely resembles a photograph, capturing real people seemingly unaware they are being observed.
19th-century photography revealed the impressionist view of physical reality. In photographs, some elements are in focus while others are not, creating varying levels of visual depth. Light and shadow play upon figures, sometimes obscuring details and sometimes creating artistic effects.
Edgar Degas was an avid photographer and photograph collector. His paintings often have a snapshot quality.
Renoir came from a poor background and was often the proverbial starving artist. Le Moulin de la Galette shows fellow middle and working-class people on their time off. It celebrates their lives and shows the joy and fun it could contain. His paintings are filled with friends, lovers, and family. Much as with John Constable, he saw beauty in the normal, daily life as he saw it.