Renoir Exhibition Reexamines Artist's Early Career and Depictions of Modern Life

A major exhibition is being organized to mark the 150th anniversary of Auguste Renoir's painting 'Bal du Moulin de la Galette' (1876). The show brings together for the first time a significant collection of Renoir's multi-figure compositions depicting contemporary subjects, created during the first two decades of his career from 1865 to 1885. These works, distinct from portraits and landscapes, represent what were termed 'scenes of modern life.' Renoir, who lived from 1841 to 1919, played a crucial role in the development of Impressionism during the 1860s to 1880s and is considered one of the foremost painters of modern urban existence, alongside artists like Edgar Degas, Gustave Caillebotte, Édouard Manet, and Claude Monet. The exhibition aims to reassess Renoir's most celebrated works by considering the artist's biography, his evolving techniques, and the social and cultural transformations of his era. It explores how Renoir, through imagery of free-spirited couples, bohemian friends, flirtatious conversations, and communal meals, developed a profound meditation on his time and on love—not merely as a subject or sentiment, but as a pictorial method and principle, viewing painting as an art of connection. The presentation is co-organized by the National Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. This is the first exhibition since 1985 focused specifically on Renoir's early period to be held in Paris. It features a carefully selected group of approximately fifty paintings, including major masterpieces such as 'La Grenouillère' (1869, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm), 'The Umbrellas' (1881-1885, The National Gallery, London), 'The Promenade' (1870, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), 'Dance at Bougival' (1883, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and a very exceptional loan of 'Luncheon of the Boating Party' (1880-1881) from the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. The exhibition seeks to offer a fresh perspective on these immensely popular works, whose innovative power and radical nature have become obscured over time through extensive reproduction and adaptation.