The exhibition brings together more than 50 works of art.
Art lovers, it’s time to fall in love. The National Gallery has announced a new exhibition, Renoir and Love. Running from 3 October to 31 January 2026, it will bring together more than 50 works by the celebrated artist.
Organised in partnership with the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, this marks the first exhibition devoted to Renoir at the National Gallery since 2007. Renoir and Love will showcase some of his most experimental, ambitious and admired canvases.
In the early 1880s, Renoir began to move away from a purely Impressionist style. While his fascination with light remained, themes of friendship, intimacy and joy continued to sit at the heart of his work. One of the major highlights is Bal au Moulin de la Galette, which will be exhibited in the United Kingdom for the very first time. The exhibition also includes The Umbrellas, a key work that demonstrates how Renoir developed these themes into paintings destined for museum walls.
Renoir and Love focuses on a crucial period in the artist’s career, spanning from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s. It traces the evolution of his imagery of affection, camaraderie and seduction, exploring ideas of courtship, child-rearing and flirtation.
Exhibition co-curator Christopher Riopelle, the Neil Westreich Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, says: “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.”
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GO: Visit www.nationalgallery.org.uk for more information.