Dance at Bougival: A Dance Through History
Famous works of art have captured the hearts of many and will continue to do so for many years to come. Art has the ability to carry on its beauty and emotion long after the life of the artist. Dance at Bougival (1883) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir depicts an image that will live throughout time for more captivated audiences of the future.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) developed paintings with the Impressionist style, an art movement that began with a group of French artists in the 19th-century among other Impressionist artists such as Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and Claude Monet (1840-1926). Renoir had many ongoing themes among his pieces, one being to portray beauty as well as the sensuality of his woman subjects. Renoir’s works of art are known to have bright accents with evident lighting and soft colors, expressing detail to people experiencing more relaxed situations. Other paintings in Renoir’s collection provide nice settings such as children learning to play piano in Young Girls at the Piano (1892) or a little girl outside on a spring day holding a watering can in A Girl with a Watering Can (1876). With theserelatable topics and situations, audiences particularly like Renoir’s message of home throughout his different works.
Renoir tends to show beauty through simplicity that audiences love to notice. One of the most well known paintings of Renoir’s work is entitled, Dance at Bougival (1883), taking place in the village of Bougival in France just ten miles from the center of Paris. This painting in particular depicts a couple dancing together where the face of the women is prominently shown while the eyes of the man are hidden beneath his hat. The woman subject in this painting is another French painter named Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938) who also posed for other paintings by artist Toulouse Lautrec in his work The Hangover (1888) as well as another Renoir painting entitled, Profile Portrait of Suzanne Valadon (1885).
With the soft use of deep red pigments in Valadon’s bonnet and the royal blue of the man’s coat, subject with the mystery of the emotion of Valadon, Dance at Bougival is still one of the most captivating works of Renoir’s career. The emotion shown in Valadon’s face allows audiences to wonder just what she is thinking, making the mind of the audience get lost within the painting and create their own observations along their own opinions. As said by Renoir himself, “the work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself and carry you away. It is the means by which the artist conveys his passion. It is the current which he puts forth, which sweeps you along in his passion.” By providing these words to fellow audiences and artists, Renoir allows people to make their own meaning from his work and allow their own thoughts to take route within his paintings.
The bonnet worn by Valadon in this painting draws the eye of the audience to her face rather than anything else Renoir included in this work. Within many of Renoir’s paintings, women are included as the main focus, revealing a sense of feminine sensuality. Renoir admired women in his paintings as a way of capturing their beauty as well as their simplicity painted in settings that he felt showed these details best. Renoir felt that “a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty…there are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.”
Throughout his lifetime, Renoir was able to portray beauty to his audience for the entirety of his career and will continue to do so for many more years to come. From quant intimate dances to learning to play the piano, Renoir recreated relatable settings in beautiful art works for his audiences to take notice in. Being one of many Impressionist artists of his time, Renoir continues to capture the focus and the minds of his audience, allowing them to develop their own insight to his paintings. Renoir made it his goal to depict beauty and simplicity of which he was successful in. Each and every one of his works gives off an essence of gorgeous settings along with his use of colors, accents, and person subjects. Incredible historic works of art have won the hearts of many audiences continue of which beauty will be carried on for many years to come.
