Dance at Bougival

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Dance at Bougival: Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir Oil Painting - Dance at Bougival

Keywords: Dance, Bougival

Work Overview: Dance at Bougival
Artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Year 1883
Type Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions 181.9 by 98.1 centimetres (71.6 in × 38.6 in)
Style Impressionism
Period Rejection of Impressionism
Genre genre painting
Location Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Dance at Bougival (French: Danse à Bougival is an 1883 work by Pierre-Auguste Renoir currently in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America.[2] It has been described as "one of the museum's most beloved works". The work depicts two of Renoir's friends, Suzanne Valadon and Paul Auguste Llhote. The painting has been described as one of Renoir's first reversions to a more classical style of painting he learned copying paintings in the Louvre while maintaining the bright palette of his fellow Impressionists.

No artist has ever been more aware than Renoir of the charms of his age, and nowhere else in his work does he celebrate his joy of life more beautifully than in the Dance at Bougival. His sense of identity with the scene is wholehearted and direct. These are the people he loved, whose simple joys he shared tirelessly and uncritically.

The girl and her partner are detached from their surroundings. Their relationship to each other is tender and unabashed. Even the most casual glance reveals that the man adores the girl. We see it in the tension of his hand as he restrains himself from squeezing her fingers too tightly, and in the carefulness with which he steers her into a turn, almost clumsy with affectionate concentration. And the girl, her body arched in the poised yet yielding pattern of the dance, turns her head and looks away - shyly delighted with the pleasure she inspires in her companion and herself. Typically for Renoir, it is the woman who takes on the greater identity, as her youthful, open face is framed enticingly by her red bonnet and brown bangs. By contrast, her admirer remains anonymous. The upper portion of his face is covered by the brim of a straw hat, and the massive bulk of his body serves but to emphasize the pliancy of hers, as even the red piping on her dress abstractly reiterates the pervasive rhythms of the dance.

Dance at Bougival bears an interesting relationship with his earlier painting, Bal Du Moulin de la Galette. In fact, the dancing couple may well be an enlarged and refined version of the pair in the middle left of the previous composition, although the theme is one that attracted the artist to explore in more than one variation. Compared with the panoramic complexity of the composition of a few years before, Renoir has here turned to a concentrated focus on two figures, now enlarged to mural scale, as they loom above the spectator. The effect of their size is enhanced by the massing of the color into bold contrasts of red and yellow, pink and blue. The interior modeling, however, retains some sense of Impressionist handling and is thus consistent with the more fluid color and open textures of the rest of the painting, where a gay and sprightly crowd is engagingly but economically suggested. Three figures seated at a table to the left and fragments of a few others to the upper right suffice to conjure an atmosphere of outdoor festivity. But the chatter and music and the tinkle of glasses are distant sounds cast from the outer shell of the world where our lovers are joined to each other in the spirit of the dance.

‘Dance at Bougival” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir is one of the best-loved works of art in Boston. Six feet tall and a couple of feet wide, it shows a man and woman, full-length and casually attired, dancing in an outdoor cafe on the outskirts of Paris. Cigarette butts are scattered on the ground at their feet.

The painting, one of Renoir’s most famous, hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts, where it sends out palpable vibrations of pleasure, creating its own mini-climate of amorousness.

It’s a mood that, from today until early September, will be created in triplicate, thanks to a loan of two related Renoir paintings from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Both pictures were painted in the same year, 1883, as “Dance at Bougival,” and both are full-length portrayals of dancing couples.

The open-air cafés of suburban Bougival, on the Seine outside Paris, were popular recreation spots for city dwellers, including the Impressionist painters. Renoir, who was primarily a figure painter, uses intense color and lush brushwork to heighten the sense of pleasure conveyed by the whirling couple who dominate the composition. The woman’s face, framed by her red bonnet, is the focus of attention, both ours and her companion’s.

Provenance
April 16, 1883, deposited by the artist with Durand-Ruel, Paris; November 12, 1884, returned to the artist; February 19, 1886, deposited by the artist with Durand-Ruel and shipped to New York; November 22, 1886, sold by the artist to Durand-Ruel and sold the same day to Mme. Hiltbrunner; June 15, 1889, deposited by Mme. Hiltbrunner with Durand-Ruel; August 25, 1891, sold by Mme. Hiltbrunner to Durand-Ruel and, in September, 1891, transferred back to Paris [see note 1]; January 2, 1894, sold by Durand-Ruel, Paris to Félix-François Depeaux (b. 1853 - d. 1920), Rouen; May 31 - June 1, 1906, Depeaux sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, lot 38, to Depeaux's brother-in-law, Edmond Décap, Paris; by descent to Maurice Barret-Décap, Biarritz, France; 1937, sold by Barret-Décap, possibly through Anthony H. Manley, Paris [see note 2] to the dealers Paul Brame (b. 1898 - d. 1971) and César de Hauke (b. 1900), Paris, for Jacques Seligmann et Fils, Paris [see note 3]; March 19, 1937, transferred from Seligmann, Paris, to Jacques Seligmann and Co., New York; April, 1937, sold by Seligmann, New York, to the MFA for $150,000. (Accession Date: May 5, 1937)

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