#france

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.

They say he painted this one mountain outside Aix over and over for the last twenty-odd years of his life — the counts people give run past thirty, once you add the watercolours. Nobody commissioned them as far as I can tell. He just kept going back.