Renoir and Love: The National Gallery Asks Us to Look Again at Impressionism's Most Divisive Painter

Tomorrow, 3 October, the National Gallery opens Renoir and Love, its first exhibition devoted to Pierre-Auguste Renoir in twenty years. At its heart is a painting that almost everyone knows and almost no one in Britain has seen in person: Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, painted in 1876 and making its UK debut exactly 150 years later. The canvas has spent its life at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and rarely travels at all. That alone makes this one of the art events of the autumn.

But the show is doing something more interesting than parading a famous loan. It is quietly picking a fight about Renoir’s reputation, and it is worth understanding what that fight is about before you go.

The problem with Renoir

Few major artists divide opinion quite like Renoir. To admirers he is the painter of pure pleasure, the heir to Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard, who carried the eighteenth-century spirit of flirtation and leisure into modern Paris. To his detractors he is the most chocolate-box of the Impressionists: sugary colour, soft-focus faces, compositions that drift. In 2015 protesters outside the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston carried signs reading “God Hates Renoir”, a good-humoured stunt that stuck because it touched something real. Renoir’s later work in particular, with its rosy nudes and fuzzy edges, has never quite shaken the charge of prettiness.

Renoir and Love sidesteps that argument rather cleverly. Instead of a full career retrospective, curators Christopher Riopelle and Chiara Di Stefano narrow the lens to roughly twenty years, from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s, when Renoir was at his most inventive. Organised jointly with the Musée d’Orsay and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the exhibition gathers around forty-five works into six rooms. The theme is the one that preoccupied him in those years: love, friendship, flirtation and the small social choreography of city life. More than a third of what he painted in that period deals with exactly this.

Paris learning to have fun

The context matters. Renoir was painting a city that had just been rebuilt. Haussmann’s boulevards, new public parks, dance halls and riverside cafés had created spaces where people of different classes could mingle in daylight, watch each other and fall, briefly, in and out of love. Renoir’s subject was not grand romance but the fleeting stuff: a glance across a dance floor, a couple mid-stride through the woods, an afternoon that will be over once the light changes. Riopelle argues that Renoir treated emotion the way he treated sunlight, as something transitory and nearly impossible to pin down.

The opening room shows him finding his feet. Mother Anthony’s Tavern (1866) gives an ordinary inn scene the compositional seriousness usually reserved for history painting. La Grenouillère (1869), painted at a popular bathing spot on the Seine alongside Monet, is a reminder of how close the two young painters were; hung near each other, their versions are hard to tell apart.

The 1870s then bring the gallant scenes, with the Getty’s The Promenade (1870) paired with the Moulin de la Galette. Critics who have seen the show agree that reproduction does the latter no favours. On the wall, its scale and texture make it something else entirely: dappled light skidding across straw hats and striped dresses, couples turning, faces half-lit, the whole crowd seeming to breathe.

Boulevards, riverbanks and a turning point

Further rooms move through street and café life, with Leaving the Conservatory (1876–77) and The Umbrellas (1881–86), a painting London audiences may recognise from the National Gallery’s own collection, before heading out to the suburbs. Here the Seine becomes a weekend playground in Oarsmen at Chatou (1879), and the paired Dance in the Country and Dance at Bougival (both 1883) show couples locked in a waltz, skirts swinging, the chemistry almost audible.

A gentler room turns to family, including Motherhood, showing Aline Charigot, later Renoir’s wife, nursing their first son. Another looks at theatre boxes, where Parisians spend as much time watching each other as the stage.

The exhibition ends at a genuine crossroads. From 1883 Renoir began to pull away from Impressionism’s fascination with shifting light, reaching for firmer outlines and timeless, classical subjects. The Great Bathers (1884–87) marks that break. It is the right place to stop, and it neatly avoids the late work that fuels most of the “God Hates Renoir” jokes.

Should you go?

Early reviews have been warm, with Artlyst awarding four stars while noting that the show does not directly confront the debate about Renoir’s quality. That is fair. But for a curious gallery-goer, the case it makes is persuasive: that in his middle years Renoir was conducting a serious, inventive study of how people find and lose each other in public, in a modernising city. Seen this way, “pretty” starts to look like a far too easy dismissal.

There is a wider lesson too. Reputations harden through reproduction; postcards, biscuit tins and memes flatten paintings into clichés. The only real corrective is standing in front of the thing itself.

Renoir and Love runs at the National Gallery, London, from 3 October 2026 to 31 January 2027. Tickets are around £20–£25, and booking is strongly advised.