Focus on Bal du moulin de la Galette and explain the Genesis.
Renoir conceived his project of painting the dancing at Le Moulin de la Galette in May 1876 and its execution is described in full by his civil servant friend Georges Rivière in his memoir Renoir et ses amis. Renoir needed to set up a studio near the mill. A suitable studio was found at an abandoned cottage in the rue Cortot with a garden described by Rivière as a "beautiful abandoned park".: 130  Several of Renoir's major works were painted in this garden at this time, including La balançoire (The Swing). The gardens  and its buildings have been preserved as the Musée de Montmartre.
Rivière identified several of the personalities in the painting. Despite Renoir's habit of distributing a sought after fashionable hat of the time amongst his models (the straw bonnet with a wide red ribbon top right is an example of this hat, called a timbale), he was unable to persuade his favourite sixteen-year-old model Jeanne Samary, who appears in La balançoire, to pose  as principal for the painting (in fact she was conducting an affair with a local boy at the time). It is her sister Estelle who poses as the girl wearing a blue and pink striped dress. These two girls came to Le Moulin every Sunday with their family; with two younger sisters barely taller than the tables, and their mother and father, properly chaperoned by their mother (entry was free for girls at Le Moulin and not all were models of virtue). Beside her is a group consisting of Pierre-Franc Lamy and Norbert Goeneutte (also appearing in La balançoire), fellow painters, as well as Rivière himself. Behind her, amongst the dancers, are to be found Henri Gervex, Eugène Pierre Lestringuez and Paul Lhote (who appears in Dance in the Country). In the middle distance, at the centre of the dance hall, the Cuban painter Don Pedro Vidal de Solares y Cardenas is depicted in striped trousers, dancing with the model called Margot (Marguerite Legrand). Apparently, the exuberant Margot found Solares too reserved and was endeavouring to loosen him up by dancing polkas with him, and teaching him dubious songs in the local slang. She was to die of typhoid just two years later, Renoir nursing her until the end, paying both for her treatment and her funeral.: 136–7 Rivière describes the painting as executed on the spot and not without difficulty, as the wind constantly threatened to blow the canvas away. This has led some critics to speculate that it was the larger d'Orsay painting that was painted here, as the smaller would have been easier to control. On the other hand, the smaller is much the more spontaneous and freely worked of the two, characteristic of en plein air work.
Jeanne Samary Musée de Montmartre Moulin de la Galette Galette Marguerite Legrand La balançoire (The Swing) Montmartre en plein air Norbert Goeneutte Dance in the Country Henri Gervex