Dance at Bougival

A closer look

The couple swirls almost life-size in the foreground, the hem of her dress lifting with the movement. Behind them, people chat and drink at tables under the trees, and the ground is strewn with cigarette ends and a dropped match, small signs of an ordinary Sunday. Renoir captures the intimacy and flirtation of the dance, the woman half shy, half charmed. The model was Suzanne Valadon, who later became a painter herself; the man was Renoir's friend Paul Lhote.