Renoir’s The Umbrellas has been hand-painted five metres tall onto the brick flank at the corner of Carnaby Street and Ganton Street. It is free, it went up on 11 September, and it stays until March 2027, which is three weeks ahead of the ticketed National Gallery show the painting headlines.
We normally walk the length of Carnaby Street in about ninety seconds and turn straight into Kingly Court, because for all its history the street itself has been the least interesting thing about Soho for a while now. This is the first reason in years to stop and look up.
The mural is a 5 x 3 metre reimagining of The Umbrellas, painted between 1881 and 1886, and it sits on the upper corner of the block above the Swatch shop, facing back down Carnaby towards the arch. It was made with the National Gallery and Global Street Art as part of Murals reMastered, a National Gallery programme putting paintings from the collection onto walls around the country.
It is painted, not printed
That is the part worth knowing. Global Street Art is the outfit behind the London Mural Festival and more than 3,000 painted walls since 2012, and this was done by hand, on a cherry picker, from a printed reference taped to the brick. Look closely at the finished wall and the brushwork is loose in the way the original is loose: the umbrella canopy is blocked in with flat blue slabs, the child’s hoop is one confident curve.
Why this painting, and why here
The Umbrellas is a crowd scene. A woman in grey carrying a basket looks straight out at you, a woman in blue is being sheltered by a man reaching in from the edge of the frame, and a child with a hoop stands at the front in a coat that must have cost someone a month’s wages. It is a painting about clothes, weather and being looked at in public, which makes Carnaby Street a more honest setting for it than a gallery wall.
There is a quieter bit of history in the credit line, too. The painting came to the nation through the Sir Hugh Lane Bequest of 1917, and it is shared with the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin under a long-standing agreement, so it is not permanently in London at all.
The exhibition it is trailing
The Umbrellas will be one of the headline works in Renoir and Love at the National Gallery, running 3 October 2026 to 31 January 2027. That show is ticketed. This wall is not, and it will still be there long after the exhibition closes.
Our take: go at the Oxford Circus end and walk south, because the mural faces down the street and you get the reveal rather than a crick in the neck. It is four storeys up on a flank wall, so you want distance rather than proximity: the best view is from the middle of the street, not the pavement underneath it. Then do what we always do and turn into Kingly Court for lunch. It is forty seconds away and it is the reason to be on this street.
Need to know
- What: a 5 x 3 metre hand-painted mural of Renoir’s The Umbrellas, part of the National Gallery’s Murals reMastered programme
- Where: corner of Carnaby Street and Ganton Street, London W1F
- When: up now, in place until March 2027
- Price: free, and visible from the street at any hour
- Nearest station: Oxford Circus, or Piccadilly Circus from the south
- The exhibition: Renoir and Love, National Gallery, 3 October 2026 to 31 January 2027, ticketed
More on the neighbourhood in our Soho guide, more painted walls in our free self-guided Shoreditch street art tour, and the rest of the season in our guide to London exhibitions.
