Dance in the Country

Dance in the Country (Danse à la campagne) is an oil-on-canvas painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, signed and dated 1883, in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris. It measures 180.3 by 90 cm and shows a couple, almost life-size, dancing on an open-air terrace.

The dealer Paul Durand-Ruel commissioned works on the theme of the dance from Renoir in 1882, and three tall canvases resulted: this one, its pendant Dance in the City, also at the Orsay, and Dance at Bougival in Boston. Renoir showed the first two as a pair at his solo exhibition at Durand-Ruel's gallery in 1883, where he simply called them Dancers; the distinguishing titles came later. According to the Musée Fournaise in Chatou, this picture was first known as Dance at Chatou and was renamed after repeated confusion with the Bougival painting.

The models were Aline Charigot, Renoir's future wife, who turns her laughing face towards us and holds a fan, and his friend Paul Lhote, a former officer and amateur painter. The Chatou museum places the scene on the balcony of the Fournaise restaurant at the end of a meal: coffee cups remain on the table at right, a straw boater has fallen to the ground, and at lower left a few faces watch the couple. The Orsay contrasts the two pendants: the elegant restraint of the city dancers in a cool interior against the gaiety of the country dance outdoors, with cool colours for Suzanne Valadon's gown and warm reds and yellows for Aline. Yet the couples seem linked by one movement, like two moments of the same dance. The museum also sees in them Renoir's change of direction in the early 1880s, with more precise drawing and simpler colour, which he linked to seeing Raphael's work in Italy.

The canvas was on deposit with Durand-Ruel from 1883 and already belonged to him by 1886. It was shown at Les XX in Brussels in 1886 and at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1905. After passing into a private collection in Paris, it was bought by the French national museums in 1979 and assigned to the Musée d'Orsay in 1986.