Renoir and Love runs at the National Gallery from 3 October 2026 to 31 January 2027.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges in 1841, started as a porcelain painter decorating plates, and carried that trade into the Impressionist group: the flushed skin, the dappled light through leaves, the sense that everyone in the picture is having a reasonably good afternoon. He is the most immediately likeable of the Impressionists and the one whose reputation has taken the most damage for it, because pleasure is the hardest thing to take seriously in a painter.
Love is the National Gallery’s way into that. The dance pictures, the boating parties, the couples in gardens — Renoir painted courtship more often than any of his contemporaries, and the show gathers the Gallery’s own Impressionist holdings with loans to make the case that the subject was a serious one for him rather than a commercial one. He also went to Italy in his forties, decided the Impressionist method had exhausted itself, and spent the rest of his life painting differently — a reversal the show has to accommodate.
It runs from Saturday 3 October 2026 to Sunday 31 January 2027, ticketed, and opens three weeks after the Gallery’s free Monet and Renoir hang closes. It also runs alongside the free Shonibare and Gainsborough room for most of its length, which is a useful pairing: one show about how the nineteenth century wanted to be seen, one about what it was not showing.