One of Renoir’s most famous paintings has never actually been exhibited in the UK. That changes this autumn, when the National Gallery brings together over 50 of his works for its biggest Renoir show in decades.
“Bal au Moulin de la Galette”, Renoir’s sweeping 1876 scene of a Sunday afternoon dance in Montmartre and one of the most reproduced Impressionist paintings in existence, has spent its whole life at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris without once crossing the Channel. It arrives at the National Gallery this October as the anchor piece of Renoir and Love, a major exhibition tracing love, friendship, flirtation and sociability through Renoir’s work from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s.
Curators Christopher Riopelle and Chiara Di Stefano have pulled together more than 50 paintings on loan from the Musée d’Orsay, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum, LA’s Getty, the Norton Simon in Pasadena and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, alongside the National Gallery’s own “The Umbrellas”. It’s the kind of guest list that rarely comes together in one room, let alone one that’s staying in London for four months.
“More than any of his contemporaries, Renoir was committed to chronicling love and friendship and their informal manifestations as keys to modern life,” says Riopelle. “Whether on Parisian street corners or in sun-dappled woodlands, he understood that emotion could be as fleeting, as evanescent, as blinding, as his other great and transitory subject, sunlight itself.”
That transitory quality is the thread running through the show: not grand romantic gestures, but the small, fleeting stuff, a dance partner’s glance, a couple mid-stride through the woods, an afternoon that will be over by the time the light changes. “Dance in the Country”, one of a trio of dance paintings Renoir produced in the early 1880s, is a good example of exactly that, a couple caught mid-turn, her expression somewhere between delight and distraction.
If you want a preview before the ticketed show opens, we’ve already written about the free display currently on in Room 41, where Renoir’s “La Grenouillère” is reunited with Monet’s painting of the same 1869 scene until 15 September. That canvas moves straight from the free display into this exhibition once it closes, so it’s worth catching both if you can.
The London x London Take: the Moulin de la Galette painting alone is worth the ticket price, it’s one of those paintings you’ve seen a thousand times in reproduction and have no real sense of the scale or texture of until it’s in front of you. Fifty-plus works is a lot to get through properly, so budget more time than you think, and go on a weekday if you can, Friday and Saturday tickets cost more and the rooms will be busier. Members get priority booking and a preview day on 2 October, worth using if you’re able to.
Need to know
- Where: National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN
- When: 3 October 2026 – 31 January 2027
- Price: £20 (Sunday-Thursday), £25 (Friday-Saturday), under 18s free, National Gallery members go free
- Tickets: Book via the National Gallery
