Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Ambroise Vollard, Paris 
Private Collection, France (by descent from the above)
Martin Fabiani, Paris
Edward Speelman, London
Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., London
The Honorable M.L. Astor, London (purchased from the above in 1953)
Astor Family Collection (by descent from the above)
William Beadleston, Inc., New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner

In 1882 and 1883, Renoir painted three large scale canvases depicting a dancing couple: La Danse à Bougival (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), La Danse à la ville (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and La Danse à la compagne (Musée d’Orsay, Paris).  This trio of paintings has been viewed as Renoir’s last, and amongst his most accomplished, depictions of urban and suburban leisure activity.  Ever the painter of "modern life," Renoir elevates the common subject by working on a scale that is virtually life-size, bringing the dancing couple right up to the picture plane and restraining background details in order to make the figures even more monumental.

The present pastel relates directly to the Boston painting, although the position of the figures has been reversed.  Renoir firmly rejected any literal interpretation of the meanings of his pictures or imposition of a story or narrative upon the scene, but certainly the style of dress and even the identification of the very dancehall – Bougival versus the nearby La Grenouillère for instance – would have created a host of associations and conclusions about social types for the viewers of the day.  In this particular composition, the male figure is clearly paying rapt attention to his partner and leans so closely in that the woman pulls slightly away from his firm grip. In the pastel, Renoir has eliminated the spectators and plants that feature in the oil paintings, thus focusing his attention on the depiction of the movement, dress and the expressions of the two dancers.

The model for the male figure was Paul Lhote, an author and friend of Renoir’s.  Renoir provided a drawing based on the Boston painting to Lhote as an illustration for a short story he published in La Vie moderne in November 1883.  The female model was the seventeen-year-old Marie-Clémentine Valadon, a young painter who later assumed the name Suzanne Valadon, and was to be the mother of Maurice Utrillo.