With Moulin de la Galette, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec continued his large-scale explorations of raucous Parisian nightlife. The pictured venue, situated at the top of the Montmartre hill, was also represented by Pierre Auguste Renoir in one of his most famous paintings (1876; Paris, Musée d’Orsay). Compositional parallels suggest that Toulouse-Lautrec may have had Renoir’s Ball at the Moulin de la Galette in mind when executing his own version of the theme. In mood, however, the two works are antithetical; indeed Toulouse-Lautrec may even have set out here to produce a dark corrective to the Renoir. Rather than a sun-dappled gathering place for wide-eyed, innocently hedonistic youths in their Sunday best, Toulouse-Lautrec portrayed a gloomy dance hall with a dowdy, lower-class clientele. While the animated figures arrayed friezelike across the top of the canvas suggest the pleasurable buzz of social interaction, they also possess a tawdry aspect. Even without the inclusion of a uniformed member of the garde républicaine at the upper right, we would sense the presence of troubling energies. Isolated in the foreground, seated on either side of an oblique barrier, are three impassive women and a man whose predatory demeanor suggests he is their pimp. Spatially proximate but psychologically remote from one another, their joyless expressions indicate that they are all business.

Toulouse-Lautrec here applied a somber palette in a deliberately approximate manner, apart from the faces in the foreground, which he delineated with cold precision. Much of the paint seems more stained than brushed onto the canvas. Apparently arbitrary vertical streaks and drips, together with the sickly green tonality, create a subaqueous, unsavory atmosphere. The work’s combination of hardened physiognomies and smeary handling left its mark on the young Pablo Picasso, whose forlorn bohemians and sad clowns are spiritual descendants of Toulouse-Lautrec’s dispirited pleasure-seekers.