Dance in the Country

Renoir liked dance scenes. The couple swept away by the music seems to have left a disorderly table, a carelessness accentuated by the hat dropped in the foreground. Exhibited by Durand-Ruel, who owned them for many years, this painting marks a change in Renoir's technique in the early 1880s. The drawing is more precise and the simplification of the palette contrasts sharply with the vibrant brushstrokes of his earlier works. Renoir himself admitted that a keener attention to drawing was the result of a need for change he felt after seeing Raphael's works in Italy.