Love and Romance with Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The National Gallery in London has announced a major retrospective dedicated to Pierre-Auguste Renoir for Autumn 2026, bringing one of the most beloved yet debated figures of Impressionism back into focus for the British public. Titled Renoir and Love, the exhibition will run from 3 October 2026 to 31 January 2027 and will bring together more than fifty works from museums and private collections across Europe and the United States. Twenty years after the last survey of comparable scale in the United Kingdom, the project aims to reconsider Renoir through a precise lens: the idea of love in its many forms, from romance to seduction, from friendship to familial intimacy. The curatorial framework, led by Christopher Riopelle, centres on human relationships as a key to understanding Renoir’s world. It reveals an artist less concerned with idyllic scenes than with the social vitality of fin-de-siècle Paris: cafés, theatres, dance halls, fleeting conversations, male companionship and domestic moments illuminated by a light that is not only painterly but also emotional. The exceptional presence of Bal au Moulin de la Galette, never before shown in the United Kingdom, decisively shapes the exhibition’s narrative, restoring the human and affectionate density of a work that has become an emblem of Impressionism. Alongside it, paintings such as The Umbrellas chart the artist’s shift in the 1880s toward more structured compositions, where luminous immediacy gives way to firmer construction without losing the emotional core that defines his work. Organised in collaboration with the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the exhibition draws on major loans from European and American institutions alike. Its aim is not celebratory but interpretive: Renoir emerges as a keen observer of modern social life, capable of translating everyday experience into a grammar of affection. The London chapter will be preceded by the Paris opening at the Musée d’Orsay and followed, in 2027, by the Boston presentation, confirming the international scope of a project that seeks to reopen the Renoir dossier and explore the many delicate yet profound nuances of human feeling in his art.