Pierre-Auguste Renoir understood something essential about modern life: that love, in all its forms, is fleeting. A glance across a crowded dance hall. The brush of a hand on a sunny afternoon. The easy intimacy of friends sharing a meal by the river. These moments pass in an instant, as transient as the dappled sunlight that Renoir captured so brilliantly on canvas.
This autumn, the National Gallery presents Renoir and Love, a major exhibition bringing together 45 works that explore the French Impressionist’s fascination with romance, desire, affection, and human connection. Running from 3 October 2026 to 31 January 2027, it’s the most significant exhibition of Renoir’s work in the UK for two decades and the first devoted to the artist at the National Gallery since 2007.
The centrepiece is a painting that has never before been exhibited in Britain: Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (1876), on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. This iconic canvas, depicting a sun-drenched afternoon at a Montmartre dance hall, is one of the most celebrated images of 19th-century Paris—a joyful swirl of movement, light, and youthful pleasure that epitomises everything Renoir did best.
The exhibition focuses on a crucial two-decade period in Renoir’s career, from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s, during which more than a third of his paintings depicted scenes of modern love and social interaction. Often set in Paris’s new public spaces—the boulevards, cafés, parks, and suburban pleasure grounds that defined the city’s emerging leisure culture—these works offer a remarkably warm and generous vision of human sociability.
“Eschewing anecdote, drama or sentimentality, Renoir sketches a joyful and light-hearted portrait of modern romance in 19th-century Paris, where the celebration of youth, beauty and sensual pleasure takes centre stage,” says exhibition co-curator Chiara Di Stefano.
Fellow co-curator Christopher Riopelle adds: “More than any of his contemporaries, Renoir was committed to chronicling love and friendship and their informal manifestations as keys to modern life. Whether on Parisian street corners or in sun-dappled woodlands, he understood that emotion could be as fleeting, as evanescent, as blinding, as his other great and transitory subject, sunlight itself.”
The exhibition traces the evolution of love’s imagery across Renoir’s work, from intimate personal scenes to ambitious multi-figure compositions. It opens with his early years, including Mother Antony’s Tavern (1866), in which the young artist boldly applied the scale and seriousness traditionally reserved for mythological subjects to a scene of everyday life—a statement of intent about what modern art could be.
The second room explores Renoir’s “gallant scenes” of the 1870s, in which he positioned himself as heir to the great French 18th-century painters Fragonard, Watteau, and Boucher, updating the rococo tradition of fêtes galantes—courtship parties—for the modern age. The Promenade (1870) and the magnificent Dance at the Moulin de la Galette represent the pinnacle of this approach.
Subsequent galleries focus on street and café scenes, including La Place Clichy (1880) and Leaving the Conservatory (1876-77); life in the outskirts of Paris, with works like Oarsmen at Chatou (1879), Dance in the Country (1883), and Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise (1875); and tender depictions of family life, including the intimate Motherhood (1885), showing Renoir’s future wife Aline Charigot nursing their first son Pierre.
A section on intellectual intimacy and physical proximity includes theatre box scenes and paintings of friends in conversation, while the final room marks a turning point: Renoir’s move away from Impressionism’s fascination with ephemeral light toward more solid, classical compositions. The Great Bathers (1884-7), a monumental canvas from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, signals the end of his Impressionist period and the beginning of something new.
Loans come from private collections and museums worldwide, including the Musée d’Orsay, the Barnes Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Clark Art Institute.
The exhibition was initiated by the Musée d’Orsay and is organised jointly with the National Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It shows in Paris from March to July 2026, in London from October 2026 to January 2027, and in Boston from February to June 2027.
Renoir and Love
When: 3 October 2026 – 31 January 2027
Where: The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN
More information: nationalgallery.org.uk
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