Pierre-Auguste Renoir

They say this started as a quick study of a French stage actress, a favourite subject who sat for several portraits like this one.

The story goes he bought this farm to stop the old olive trees being pulled up for a flower nursery, then spent his last years painting the place. By then his hands were badly arthritic — apparently brushes had to be wedged into them for him.

One of three dance scenes a dealer commissioned in one go, so they're usually talked about as a set rather than on their own. The woman modelling is said to be Suzanne Valadon, who was posing for painters at the time and went on to become a serious painter herself — which nobody seems to have expected.

The people in it were his actual friends, from what I've read — regulars at a riverside restaurant outside Paris, hauled back weekend after weekend across a whole season while he worked on it. The woman playing with the little dog is supposedly the one he ended up marrying.

The banking family who commissioned it were, by most accounts, slow to pay and stuck it somewhere out of the way once they had it — supposedly he complained about the whole business in letters for years afterwards. Portraits like this were bread-and-butter money for him while the paintings he actually wanted to make weren't selling.

She was apparently one of the most famous stage actresses in Europe, and sat for this just weeks before the First World War broke out. They say his arthritis was so bad by then that he worked with the brush wedged into his bandaged hand.