The subject of the work is a night scene in the famous Parisian nightclub Moulin de la Galette, crowded with people dancing, in the middle band, or resting at tables, in the lower left corner.
Following Impressionist dictates, Picasso paints people not with meticulous precision, but as if they were large blobs of color in motion, under a pinwheel of artificial lights that appear to be floating.
Four groups of characters stand out: the dancers in the center, in a whirling whirlwind; the couple with an androgynous figure in profile to the right, pale and elongated like a mask; then the three men in top hats on a platform to the left, who seem to be scouring the crowd in search of a companion; and finally the trio of women at the white table, two of whom are kissing and look as if they have just stepped out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting, while the third rests her elbow on her arm and with her face carefully defined.
This last figure winks and smiles, coquettishly escaping direct gaze with the viewer: she is Germaine Gargallo, a model he met in the Paris studio of the Barcelona painter Isidre Nonell, for whose unrequited love Carlos Casagemas would commit suicide shortly after Picasso returned to Spain.
[3] In 2007 the heirs of Berlin banker Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy demanded the return of "Le Moulin de la Galette" from the Guggenheim.