Exhibition guide

The colourful and joyful paintings of Auguste Renoir, his iconography of guinguettes and public balls, made him a "painter of happiness". This reputation has sometimes led to marginalizing him among the great painters of modernity, on the ground that he can only be melancholy or ironic, disillusioned or disenchanted. Yet his work offers an original reflection on modernity, placed under the sign of love, understood both as a force governing human relations and as a feeling guiding the artist's gaze on his models, on the world and on painting itself.

Visit details

  • Dates: From Tuesday 17 March 2026 to Sunday 19 July 2026: Thursday from 09:30 to 21:45 Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday from 09:30 to 18:00
  • Venue: Musée d'Orsay, Esplanade Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Paris
  • Price: De 0 à 16 euros.
  • Audience: All audiences
  • Source: Event page

About the exhibition

" I know that it is difficult to admit that a painting can be very great painting by remaining joyful" (Auguste Renoir.)On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876), masterpiece of the collections of the Musée d'Orsay, this exhibition gathers for the first time this major corpus of "modern life scenes" – paintings with several figures representing contemporary subjects (distinct portraits and landscapes) – made by Renoir during the first 20 years of his career (1865-1885). During this period, he participated in the collective invention of a "New Painting" alongside Manet, Monet, Morisot, Degas or Caillebotte. However, he is distinguished by his singular sense of empathy and his ability to marvel, choosing only happy subjects and always highlighting his models. This "love" look is manifested in a pronounced taste for ties – in its motifs (conversations, meals, dance...) as in its way of painting, attentive to everything that can contribute to a feeling of unity (gestures of characters, enveloping light, balance of colors, fluid and sketchy touches that melt objects into each other).

The exhibition also highlights Renoir's preference for the representation of the young couple but intends to deconstruct a received idea that would like his painting to be "feeling." On the contrary, it avoids the too direct expression of emotions, the Romanesque narrative, just as much as erotic staging. Admiring the French painters of the XVIIIth century (Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard), Renoir revives an atmosphere of "galante festivals" and promotes a form of freedom of manners and gender equality in the Paris of the end of the Second Empire and the beginnings of the Third Republic. This choice must be understood in the light of the artist's biography, which then leads a "life of bohemia" marked by relations then considered "illegal", and placed in the context of the 19th century marked by marriage and bourgeois norms, religious morality, the importance of prostitution and very strong inequalities between men and women. In this context, Renoir's great formats dedicated to the happy couple, to the "comrade" (according to his friend Rivière's words) and to conviviality, appear as manifestos against the violence of gender relations, class antagonisms and the growing loneliness of urban life.

Co-organized with the National Gallery of London and the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston, this exhibition offers a renewed look at such famous paintings that it has become difficult to perceive all the new ones today. For the first time since 1985 – date of the last retrospective Renoir organized in Paris – an exhibition gathers a narrow but significant set of works (about fifty paintings) from the first part of the artist's career, among which his greatest masterpieces: from La Grenouillère (1869, Stockholm, Nationalmuseum) to Parallies (1881-1885, London, The National Gallery), passing through La Promenade (1870, Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum), Dance in Bouvigal (1883, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts) and Le Déjeuner des boissoniers (1880-1881) very exceptionally loaned by the Phillips Collection in Washington.