Renoir et l’amour — La modernité heureuse (1865 — 1885) — Musée d’Orsay — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In 3 months: March 17 → July 19, 2026

The colorful and joyful paintings of Auguste Renoir, his iconography of open-air cafés and public dances, made him a “painter of happiness.” This reputation has sometimes led to his being marginalized among the great painters of modernity, on the grounds that modernity could only be melancholic or ironic, disillusioned or disenchanted.

“I know well how difficult it is to make people admit that a painting can be truly great painting while remaining joyful,” Renoir said. Yet his work offers an original reflection on modernity, shaped by the theme of love, understood both as a force governing human relationships and as a sentiment guiding the artist’s gaze upon his models, upon the world, and upon painting itself.

On the occasion of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876), a masterpiece of the Musée d’Orsay’s collections, this exhibition brings together for the first time this major corpus of “scenes of modern life,” multi-figure paintings depicting contemporary subjects (distinct from portraits and landscapes) produced by Renoir during the first twenty years of his career (1865–1885). During this period, he took part in the collective invention of a “new painting” alongside Manet, Monet, Morisot, Degas, and Caillebotte. He distinguished himself, however, through his singular sense of empathy and capacity for wonder, choosing only happy subjects and always highlighting his models. This “loving” gaze is expressed through a pronounced taste for connections—in his motifs (conversations, meals, dancing) as much as in his manner of painting, attentive to anything that can contribute to a sense of unity (the gestures of the figures, enveloping light, balanced colors, fluid and sketch-like brushstrokes that blend objects into one another).

Pierre-Auguste Renoir dit Auguste Renoir, La Promenade, 1870 (Détail) © Image courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum

The exhibition also highlights Renoir’s preference for portraying the young couple, seeking to dismantle the preconceived notion that his painting is “sentimental.” On the contrary, it avoids the overly direct expression of emotions, romantic storytelling, as well as erotic staging. An admirer of eighteenth-century French painters (Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard), Renoir revived an atmosphere of “fêtes galantes” and promoted a form of freedom of manners and equality between the sexes in the Paris of the late Second Empire and early Third Republic. This choice must be understood in light of the artist’s biography, as he then led a “bohemian life” and maintained relationships deemed “illegitimate” in the nineteenth-century context marked by marriage, bourgeois norms, religious morality, the important place of prostitution, and strong gender inequalities. In this setting, Renoir’s large-scale paintings devoted to the happy couple, to “camaraderie” (in the words of his friend Rivière), and to conviviality appear as so many manifestos against the violence of gender relations, class antagonisms, and the growing loneliness of urban life.

Co-organized with the National Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, this exhibition offers a renewed perspective on paintings so famous that it has become difficult today to perceive their full originality. For the first time since 1985—the date of the last Renoir retrospective organized in Paris—an exhibition gathers a focused yet significant selection of works (about fifty paintings) from the first part of the artist’s career, including his greatest masterpieces: from La Grenouillère (1869, Stockholm, Nationalmuseum) to Parapluies (1881–1885, London, The National Gallery), including La Promenade (1870, Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum), La Danse à Bougival (1883, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts), and Le Déjeuner des canotiers (1880–1881), very exceptionally loaned by the Phillips Collection in Washington.

Curatorship: Paul Perrin, chief curator and director of conservation and collections, Musée d’Orsay, with the participation of Lucie Lachenal-Tabellet, documentary studies officer, Musée d’Orsay