Monet and Renoir painted the same scene, side by side, in 1869. For a few weeks only, you can see the results together again, free.
In the summer of 1869, two young, ambitious and broke painters set up their easels shoulder to shoulder at La Grenouillère, a fashionable bathing and boating spot on the Seine just outside Paris. Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted the same lively scene from almost the same position, and between them produced six paintings that summer, work now widely credited with helping to invent Impressionism as we know it.
Monet’s “Bathers at La Grenouillère” has lived at the National Gallery since 1979. Renoir’s version of the same view has been in Stockholm, at the Nationalmuseum, ever since. For the first time in almost 20 years, the two are hanging together in Room 41, free to see, until 15 September.
Side by side, the two paintings make an unusually direct case for how differently two artists can see the same thing. Monet was already drifting toward the obsession with light that would define his career, his brushwork is broad and fragmented, breaking the water’s surface into shifting, shimmering colour. Renoir, meanwhile, was drawn to the people: shorter, warmer brushstrokes pick out the fashionable Parisians gathered on the little island at the centre of the scene, and the whole canvas has a softer, sunnier feel.
It’s a genuinely rare chance to stand in front of both at once and watch two friends, working the same subject at the same moment, arrive at two completely different paintings. Renoir’s canvas is only in London on loan, and once the display closes it moves straight into the National Gallery’s major autumn exhibition, Renoir and Love (3 October 2026 to 31 January 2027), which explores the friendships, romance and experimentation running through Renoir’s work more broadly, including two more of his best-loved paintings, “The Promenade” and “Dance in the Country”, both pictured here.
The London x London Take: the free display is small, two paintings and a few minutes of your time, but it’s a genuinely good use of both. Room 41 is easy to duck into on a lunch break or between other galleries, and there’s something quietly moving about seeing the exact moment two friends’ styles started to diverge, in real time, on two canvases painted a few feet apart. Go before 15 September, then decide separately whether the ticketed fireworks in October are worth it once Renoir’s picture has moved on. It’s also a good reminder that the National Gallery is still one of London’s best free museums, and consistently one of the city’s best art galleries full stop.
Need to know
- Where: Room 41, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN
- When: Now until 15 September 2026, 10am-6pm daily (10am-9pm Fridays)
- Price: Free, no booking required
- More info: National Gallery website
