Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 'Dancing Girl with Castanets', 1909

These two pictures of dancers in exotic costumes are near life-size. They were were made as part of the decorations of an apartment at 24 Avenue de Friedland in central Paris. It belonged to Maurice Gangnat, a wealthy steel magnate and art collector and one of Renoir’s most discerning clients. Renoir’s son Jean recalled that. ‘whenever he [Gangnat] entered the studio, his gaze fell on the canvas Renoir considered his best. "He has an eye for it!" my father declared.’ By the time Renoir died in 1919, Gangnat had acquired 158 of his pictures.

These panels were made to face each other, hanging on either side of a mirror above the fireplace in the dining room. They belong to a tradition of decorative art used to enliven architectural features with painted figures, often in poses which mimicked sculptural forms. It was a French tradition which dated back to the sixteenth century and reached its peak in the eighteenth century, and was still popular in Belle Époque Paris in the early twentieth century.

These paintings were made late in Renoir’s career when he was 67 or 68 years old. As a youthful apprentice he had trained as a decorative artist, learning to paint scenes on porcelain plates and also making murals and decorating window shades. It was a discipline which he apparently returned to with some enthusiasm – around the same time as painting the two dancers he produced two other panels, this time depicting pairs of nudes acting as caryatids - or human supports - for garlands above their heads (Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania).

According to an account by one of the models, Georgette Pigeot, the original idea was to depict the women carrying baskets of fruit – an appropriate motif for a dining room. This idea was abandoned in case Gangnat decided to move house and wanted to be able to install them in a different room, which he eventually did. Renoir used Pigeot to model both dancers, but it was his maid, Gabrielle Renard, who posed for the head of the figure in Dancing Girl with Castanets. Of the two, this represents the more animated of the figures. The dancer lifts her foot and raises her castanets as she dances to the rhythm tapped out by her counterpart on her tambourine.

The costumes of both dancers have oriental - or near-Eastern - overtones, especially the slippers and short gold-coloured bodices, and the harem pants worn by the woman in Dancing Girl with Tambourine. Parts of these costumes still survive at Renoir’s house in the south of France. 

Renoir considered these paintings to be among the most important of his later works and, shortly after they were acquired by the National Gallery, they were praised by the sculptor Henry Moore. He felt that in these pictures Renoir ‘had learned to fit his forms into space’. Moore admired their monumental quality but also the ‘delicious colour’, ‘the marvellous supple rhythm’ and ‘rounded forms’ of the figures. ‘These pictures represent,’ he wrote, ‘a significant episode in Renoir’s career, a special effort… that’s why I believe they are the kind of pictures we should have in the National Gallery.’