Natasha Blair visits London’s latest must-see exhibition – the uplifting Renoir and Love Exhibition at the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square.
Impressionism is one of my favourite styles of painting, and The Renoir and Love Exhibition at the National Gallery well and truly confirms this. Although recently open, visitor numbers have exceeded expectation. The exhibition showcases 40 paintings brought together from collections around the world, including some never shown before.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a key figure of Impressionism believing that arts’ ultimate goal was to bring delight. This display fulfils his wishes, allowing visitors to discover his gift for showing love, friendship, and everyday emotion.
Unlike most of the Impressionist artists, Renoir came from a working-class background. He was inspired by radical artists who challenged academic norms, championing a new art form based on modern contemporary subjects. Painting alongside close friends Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley, he developed a scintillating, luminous style that sought to capture the subtle variations of natural light.
In the first twenty years of his career, from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s, he also shared the Impressionists’ commitment to painting modern life. Places of Parisian leisure became favourite locations: dance halls, cafés, theatres, boulevards and boating spots. Love, in all its forms – flirtation, friendship, family bonds and social interactions- became his abiding theme. Towards the end of the 1860s his use of muted, dark and earthy tones transformed into the bright and luminous palette of colours that became the hallmark of his paintings.
Renoir experimented with style and theme to become an innovator of Impressionism portraying sun-dappled gardens and the swirling dance halls of Paris. He portrayed the working class in an era when women were starting to be allowed out alone. Renoir gave unaccompanied young women centre stage. Such figures were objects of considerable moral anxiety at the time with the assumption that most were sex workers.
His portrayals of independent, unchaperoned women played on this ambiguity. In contrast to the moralising approach of many of his contemporaries, his look was non-judgemental and often appreciative. His paintings encourage the viewer to experience the enjoyment portrayed in the paintings as seen with the people of Montmartre in his iconic painting ‘Bal au Moulin de la Galette’.
Scenes of leisure in the Parisian countryside were central to Impressionist imagery. In the 1870s and early 1880s Renoir set many of his best loved paintings in such places. He took delight in capturing women’s summertime fashions and the outfits worn by the oarsmen. Most of his scenes took place outdoors although there are also intimate spaces of theatre boxes, corners of rooms, the artist’s studio and home that convey a sense of closeness as Renoir ensured that the viewer felt involved in the scene portrayed.
.Eager to create a new style, Renoir went to Italy to see the grandeur of the Renaissance. “I still have it in me to knock Raphael off his pedestal” he said. He was profoundly impressed by Raphael’s depictions of the Virgin and Child. Young Mother was Renoir’s modern, secular response although he nodded to convention by showing his model wearing a wedding ring.
Renoir and Love at the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square is not to be missed. Booking essential.
Tell me more about Renoir and Love Exhibition at the National Gallery.
The National Gallery, Sainsbury Wing, Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN.
The National Gallery is one of the greatest art galleries in the world. Founded by Parliament in 1824, the Gallery houses the British nation’s collection of Western European paintings from the late 13th to the early 20th century.
Entry to the National Gallery’s Collection is free. Renoir and Love, staged in conjunction with the Musée d’Orsay, Paris and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is being held in their modernised Sainsbury wing, and runs until 31 January 2027.
£25 per day to the 17 October – thereafter on Friday and Saturday. £20 Sunday to Thursday. Under 18s go free. After 5pm on Friday evenings from 23 October 2026 to 15 January 2027 visitors can pay what-ever they wish.
Audio guides available in both English and French £5.00.
Nearest tube – Charing Cross
