PIERRE AUGUSTE RENOIR : “Le Moulin de la Galette”, 1876 - oil on canvas, 131- 175 cm. - Paris, Musée d'Orsay

This painting has been described as “the most beautiful painting of the 19 th century”. The scene depicted one of the numerous dances celebrated in the Moulin de la Galette, one of the most frequented restaurants and leisure clubs of the Montmartre Hill and paradise for bohemians and artists like Toulouse-Lautrec, van Gogh or Renoir himself.

This work is a masterpiece in which Renoir portrays many of his friends – as the Cuban painter Pedro Vidal and his partner, other French painters like Lamy, Gervex or Codey- spending a placid Sunday afternoon in the Moulin's garden. But not all of the figures in the painting are famous names: Renoir himself affirmed that several of the feminine models were prostitutes: “I was afraid some men might prohibit to their “ladies” the attendance to my study, but they were also good guys. Some of them even became my masculine models”. Artists, bohemians, prostitutes… all of them forming an authentic “human zoo” that transfers us to those bohemian afternoons in the 19 th century Paris.