Renoir. The Man and His Life
The Musee d’Orsay celebrates its 40th anniversary with a major show devoted to Renoir’s most luminous years, those from 1865 to 1885. Fifty paintings bring together the universe of pleasure, love and human conviviality that the painter built before his Impressionist crisis, a declaration in favor of a happy modernity.
Around 1883, Renoir had the feeling of having taken Impressionism to a point of exhaustion. Working outdoors, subject to the urgency of light, left him no time to compose. The painter who works solely from nature, he said, ends up seeking only the momentary and becomes monotonous. The old masters did not ignore those effects, they simply disdained them. This spiritual fatigue produced in the painter a reorientation toward a more disciplined technique, of refined line, defined contours and cooler colors. Part of the information that has come down to us is due to Ambroise Vollard, an influential French dealer and publisher and a key figure in the spread of Impressionism, who collected many of the testimonies and anecdotes about his friendship with Renoir in his book on the life and work of the artist.
However, it was precisely in the years before that crisis that Renoir most fully built the world that identifies him, a universe dominated by pleasure, love, the body and human conviviality. That period, between 1865 and 1885, is the one that articulates the exhibition Renoir and Love. Happy Modernity, organized by the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. Coinciding with the museum’s 40th anniversary, the show, which opened on 17 March, brings together some fifty paintings made during his Impressionist years.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Promenade, 1870. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
According to Vollard, Renoir never wanted to darken pleasure or make it solemn. He complained that good humor was not taken seriously. In his paintings, love does not appear as an abstract feeling, but as a visible and shared experience, glances, bodies that brush against each other, gestures of complicity, leisure scenes. Gardens, cafes, dances, the banks of the Seine or restaurants are the settings of a modern life in the open air marked by youth and sociability.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Le Dejeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party), 1880-1881, oil on canvas. The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.
The works in the exhibition show how Renoir approached modern life without irony or critical distance. He observed a society in transformation, but not from denunciation, rather from a conciliatory vision, in which shared pleasure and social harmony occupy the center.
Renoir in his Paris studio, at the end of his life, before the portrait of Tilla Durieux (1914).
Renoir said he had no rules or methods. He painted “like a child” and sought relationships of color that were sonorous. He wanted a red to sound like a bell. If he did not achieve it, he added more red or other colors until he did. Art, he affirmed, should not be able to be explained; if it could be explained, it would not be art. Of the nude he said that there were innumerable nuances and that he had to find those that made the flesh live and throb on the canvas.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Danse a la ville (Dance in the City), 1883. Musee d’Orsay, Paris.
The landscape, in these years, was not for him an end in itself, but a living frame for the human presence. Unlike Monet, Renoir did not use nature as an autonomous theme, but as a space where the body, gesture and relationship could unfold. Even when he took up traditional themes, the figure appears integrated into a world that breathes with light.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Bal du moulin de la Galette, 1876, oil on canvas. Musee d’Orsay, Paris.
The final stretch of the tour marks the moment when, in the mid-1880s, Renoir begins a transition toward another stylistic stage and progressively moves away from the themes of modern life. It is not a rupture, but the closing of a cycle. The painter himself affirmed that there was nothing outside the classics and that the classical could appear in any era. Tradition had never prevented originality, it made it possible.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Theater Box (La Loge), 1874, oil on canvas, 80 x 63 cm. The Courtauld Gallery, London.
The show is presented in dialogue with Renoir, Draughtsman, devoted to his graphic production, and offers a historical, aesthetic and social approach to a body of work in which love does not function as an isolated motif, but as a way of being in the world. In the book Renoir, My Father written by his son, Jean Renoir collects statements by the painter about the tactile and bodily desire of painting. Renoir wanted painting to make one want to enter it, to stroll if it was a landscape, to touch if it was a body. That present drive defines the happy modernity that the Musee d’Orsay today brings back to the stage.
Renoir and Love. Happy Modernity (1865-1885)
Musee d’Orsay
Esplanade Valery Giscard d’Estaing, 75007 Paris
Curators: Paul Perrin and Lucie Lachenal-Tabellet
Until 19 July 2026
– Renoir. The Man and His Life – – Alejandra de Argos –
