Renoir and Love at the National Gallery: Friendship, Intimacy and Modern Life

Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (1876)

Renoir’s reputation for prettiness can make it easy to miss how ambitious his paintings are. Renoir and Love, running at the National Gallery Oct 3 to January 31, 2027, makes the case for taking his pursuit of pleasure seriously: not as an escape from modern life, but as a conscious choice to paint the ways people relate to one another. Sociability runs through the exhibition — friendship, family, flirtation, companionship — but also the relationship between Renoir and his sitters, and between his paintings and the people looking at them.

Self-portrait

That emphasis helps explain why the artist has been underrated in recent decades. Much of the story of modern art is told through painters who faced the anxieties and harsher realities of their time. Renoir painted people eating, dancing, talking, looking and being looked at, and the ease of it can pass for lightness.

In Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (1876), one of the highlights of the exhibition, pleasure is inseparable from the choreography of the crowd. There is no single focal point. The eye travels from person to person, and we are seated almost at the table, looking into a company that is entirely absorbed in itself.

This is Renoir’s modernity: not the isolated individual but the crowd, and the intricate business of belonging to it.

Renoir’s views on sociability come into sharper focus in Leaving the Conservatory (1876–77). A young woman and her chaperone are approached by a father and son, the father nudging the boy forward in what looks like the opening move of a carefully managed courtship. Everything is conveyed through gesture and gaze: who approaches, who responds, who watches. Renoir makes a small social ritual the whole subject, and we stand close enough to watch it unfold.

The Umbrellas (c. 1881–86) widens the lens again. Instead of one encounter, the canvas is full of strangers sharing a wet street, each working out how much space to give and take.

In Dance at Bougival (1883), the social exchange becomes more physical.  A couple dance closely in a crowded open-air café, their attention fixed on each other while the world around them falls away. Renoir surrounds them with the traces of sociability — tables, glasses, cigarette ends, other people — but gives the couple a private intensity within the public space. The painting captures the moment when being among people becomes an encounter between two. 

Christopher Riopelle, one of the exhibition's curators, says Renoir was "committed to chronicling love and friendship and their informal manifestations as keys to modern life." It is a fair description. Renoir has little interest in grand declarations. He cares about a glance, a gesture, an invitation, a shared table.

The exhibition moves from public sociability towards a quieter form of intimacy in Renoir’s paintings of families and children. In Young Mother (1881), a woman holds a child on her lap, absorbed in caring for him. The painting belongs to the exhibition’s wider interest in family and child-rearing, but it also brings Renoir himself closer to the relationships he paints.

The exhibition also traces a marked change in Renoir’s style. The loose brushwork and flickering colour of the 1870s gradually give way to more solid forms and a stronger emphasis on drawing. His trip to Italy in 1881, and his study of Renaissance painting, contributed to this shift. By The Great Bathers (1884–87), which ends the exhibition. the figures are monumental, the outlines hard and the landscape built rather than glimpsed. It marks the end of the years when Renoir's modern subjects and Impressionist technique worked in step, and the start of a more classical direction.

Across the exhibition, Renoir’s modern life is a social one: friendship, affection, companionship, flirtation, family life and the ordinary pleasure of being among other people. These encounters receive the same sustained attention that other artists gave to the anxieties of modern life.