The exhibition will go on display at the gallery in Autumn 2026.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, 1876
Oil on canvas, 131.5 cm x 176.5 cm.
Gustave Caillebotte Bequest, 1896
© Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt
The National Gallery has announced an exhibition devoted to Renoir which will go on display to the public from the 3 October 2026 – 31 January 2027, this will be the first big exhibition devoted to the artist’s work in the UK for 20 years.
Titled Renoir and Love, the exhibition will feature over 50 works to nclude his most experimental, ambitious and admired canvases including the iconic ‘Bal au Moulin de la Galette’ (1876, the Musée d’Orsay, Paris), which will be exhibited in the UK for the first time.
Organised in partnership with the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, ‘Renoir and Love’ will focus on the crucial years of the artist’s career, from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s.
The show is set to look at the evolution the imagery of affection, seduction, conversation, male camaraderie and the sociability of the café and theatre, as well as merry-making, flirtation, courtship and child-rearing in Renoir’s art.
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 streetcorners 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.’
Among the works that will go on show will include several full-length figure compositions, such as ‘The Umbrellas’ (1881, reworked 1885, National Gallery), which show how Renoir develops the theme into paintings ‘worthy of the museum.’ His Dance compositions remain universally loved symbols of the French fin-de-siècle. In the early 1880s Renoir moved away from Impressionist style with its fascination with the play of light to more solid, sculptural compositions, but the theme of friendship and joy in nature remains.