The National Gallery has announced a major exhibition of paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), opening this autumn.
Presenting 45 works, Renoir and Love promises to be the most significant exhibition of the celebrated French Impressionist’s work in the UK for 20 years.
The exhibition, organised in partnership with the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, focuses on the crucial years of the artist’s career, from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s, and features some of his most experimental, ambitious and admired canvases including the iconic Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (1876, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), exhibited in the UK for the first time.
The exhibition traces the evolution of the imagery of love, desire, affection, flirtation, friendship and family bonds in Renoir’s art, through intimate and personal works to multi-figure compositions of urban and suburban sociability – such as The Umbrellas (1881, reworked 1885, the National Gallery). The artist’s ‘Dance’ compositions remain universally loved symbols of the French ‘fin-de-siècle’.
Bringing together loans from private collections and museums around the world, the exhibition opens with an exploration of the artist’s early years before focusing on Renoir’s gallant scenes of the 1870s. Highlights include The Promenade, 1870 (The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) and the Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, 1876 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), considered two of the greatest examples of this genre.
Street and café scenes, scenes of family life and depictions of intellectual intimacy and physical proximity all feature, and the exhibition closes with an exploration of the end of Renoir’s Impressionist era and the beginning of a new phase in his career, in which his favourite motifs shifted from scenes of modern Parisian life to classical, timeless themes.
Exhibition co-curator Christopher Riopelle 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.”
Renoir and Love opens at the National Gallery on 3 October (until 31 January). For further information: nationalgallery.org.uk
Image: 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