Musée d’Orsay’s New Renoir Double Bill Reframes the Painter as a Modernist of Human Connection
Paris is about to get a Renoir it thinks it already knows. On March 17, the Musée d’Orsay opens a paired presentation that aims to unsettle the familiar image of French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) as merely the author of agreeable, “pretty” pictures. Instead, the museum is positioning him as an artist of restless invention and, crucially, of modern life seen through the intimacy of human relationships.
The centerpiece, “Renoir and Love: A Joyful Modernity (1865-85),” opens alongside “Renoir Drawings,” a focused exhibition traveling from the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. Together, the shows make a case that Renoir’s early career, often reduced to a handful of iconic canvases, rewards sustained looking — and that his modernity lies less in stylistic labels than in the social world he painted.
“The last big exhibition of his paintings at Orsay dates back to 1985,” says the curator Paul Perrin, underscoring how long it has been since the museum mounted a major, painting-led reconsideration. While the 2009 Grand Palais exhibition “Renoir in the 20th Century” concentrated on the artist’s later years, Orsay’s new project turns to the first 20 years of his work: the period in which he helped establish Impressionism and then, “bit by bit,” began to detach himself from it.
For Perrin, the key is Renoir’s sustained attention to contemporary experience. The exhibition gathers works depicting entertainment and leisure — boating, dancing, eating, the theater, the streets of Paris — as evidence of an artist deeply engaged with the textures of his time. “All these works where Renoir depicts contemporary life… all this truly modern inspiration means that Renoir, during these years, can be considered one of the great painters of modernity,” Perrin says.
The show also leans on the power of loans to refresh the story. Among the works highlighted is “Luncheon of the Boating Party” (1880-81), a canonical painting that has not been seen in Paris for decades. Visitors will also encounter pictures from private collections that rarely appear in public, including “Confidence” (1897), a work once owned by Greta Garbo.
After its Paris run, “Renoir and Love: A Joyful Modernity (1865-85)” will travel to the National Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. For the three institutions, Perrin describes the collaboration as a chance to place their own signature Renoirs into a broader narrative: Orsay’s “Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette” (1876), London’s “The Umbrellas” (around 1881-86), and Boston’s “Dance at Bougival” (1883).
If the exhibition’s title suggests romance, the curatorial argument is wider. Love, as the show frames it, is the connective tissue of Renoir’s world: seduction, certainly, but also conversation, friendship, camaraderie, and the larger bonds of family and conviviality. “It’s what sets him apart from Manet, Degas and the others,” Perrin says. “His modernity is that of human connection.”
That emphasis is sharpened by the curators’ attention to class and proximity. Perrin contrasts Renoir’s gaze with that of contemporaries such as Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet, who, he argues, often approached subjects like prostitutes or café workers with the distance of middle-class observers. Renoir, by comparison, is presented as painting from within the social fabric he depicts.
Christopher Riopelle, a curator at the National Gallery, describes Renoir as “a working-class lad,” noting his origins in Limoges and the precariousness of his early years in Paris. In Riopelle’s view, friendship became a kind of anchor — “male friendship, female friendship, whatever — as a way to situate himself in the world.”
Taken together, Orsay’s double bill proposes a Renoir defined less by sweetness than by attentiveness: to bodies in motion, to public pleasure, and to the subtle negotiations of being together in a modern city.
“Renoir and Love: A Joyful Modernity (1865-85)” is on view at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, March 17 to July 19; at the National Gallery, London, October 3 to January 31, 2027; and at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, February 20 to June 13, 2027. “Renoir Drawings” is on view at the Musée d’Orsay, March 17 to July 5.
