With the exhibition Renoir et l’amour, the Musée d’Orsay offers a new interpretation of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s work, focusing on the central role love played in his artistic research. Organised in collaboration with the National Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the exhibition brings together around sixty paintings, drawings and pastels created between the 1860s and 1880s, a period during which the artist developed a luminous, personal style marked by a keen interest in human relationships. Far from treating love as a decorative or sentimental theme, Renoir approached it as a modern phenomenon, shaped by the social changes transforming urban life in contemporary Paris. Couples, friends, families, as well as solitary figures lost in thought inhabit his compositions, often set in public spaces such as gardens, theatres, open-air cafes along the Seine. Unlike other Impressionist Masters, Renoir favoured a serene and radiant vision of affection, avoiding dramatic or psychological overtones. The light surrounding the figures, the warm palette and soft forms suggest an idea of love as harmony and shared experience. Among the most emblematic works featured in the exhibition are the Portrait of Alphonsine Fournaise, The Reader, Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette, Girls at the Piano, The Theatre Box and the Portrait of Madame Charpentier, each representing a different facet of Renoir’s attention to intimacy, closeness and the beauty of everyday gestures. The exhibition follows a thematic and chronological path showing how love, for Renoir, is not just a recurring subject but a lens through which to trace the evolution of his style: from realist beginnings to Impressionist explorations and the more decorative and classical tendencies of his later years. The show encourages visitors to reconsider Renoir as a painter of human relationships, able to capture with sensitivity the emotions and bonds that define modern life. It is also an opportunity to reflect on how art can depict love not through idealisation, but by conveying its vitality and complexity within the contexts of real life.
