This painting depicts a happy scene in the Moulin de la Galette, a square in Montmartre, Paris, on a Sunday afternoon. Some commentators have observed that the girl in the striped dress (middle foreground) is Estelle, a sister of one of Renoir’s models. Other figures from the artist’s life are also evident in this painting: at the right-most table, for example, sit several of Renoir’s friends. One of them, Georges Rivière, described the Moulin de la Galette as ‘a page of history, a precious monument of Parisian life depicted with rigorous exactness. Nobody before [Renoir] had thought of capturing some aspect of daily life in a canvas of such large dimensions.’