Renoir's Moulin de la Galette is located in Paris at the Musée d'Orsay.

This bustling social scene depicts working or middle-class Parisian men and women enjoying an evening free from work. Renoir's large, anonymous gathering is a carefree scene of flirtation and joviality.

Paris was overflowing with newcomers in search of better opportunities. Grand boulevards, constructed only a decade earlier by city planner Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann, spread wide stone pathways like arteries through the city, opening up new urban spaces while destroying the cobbled streets and byways of established communities.

Just a few years before Renoir painted this scene of working-class leisure in Moulin de la Galette, the city of Paris was in chaos. Following the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, the newly-elected French National Assembly ceded Alsace and Lorraine to the Germans. This was only part of the agreement, however. The National Assembly also agreed to surrender a huge sum of money to the Germans. This entire arrangement angered the city of Paris, and some of its more revolutionary-minded citizens formed a municipal government called the Commune.

Renoir uses very loose brushwork to depict the glasses of beer in front of these men. The frosted glass is almost entirely composed of white daubs of oil paint. Echoing the ephemeral pleasure represented in the image itself, Renoir's brushstrokes are light, gestural, and loosely contoured. His use of paint doesn't describe but rather suggests shapes and objects; like other Impressionists, Renoir thoroughly rejects the strict rules of academic styles of painting in his depiction of modern working-class life.