“Renoir and Love” at the National Gallery

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For the first retrospective devoted to Pierre-Auguste Renoir in the U.K. for 20 years, the National Gallery showcases the first two decades of the impressionist’s career, centering his joyful and sensuous scenes of modern life in an exhibition proudly sponsored by Sotheby’s. More than 50 paintings in this highly selective exhibition reveal the artist’s exuberant, silken brushwork and intoxicating use of color, including the 1876 masterpiece “Bal du moulin de la Galette,” which marks 150 years since its creation. Distinguished by his love of narrative and character, as much as the sensual immediacy of impressionism, Renoir trained his eye on happy scenes of the world around him — the dancehalls, theatres, boulevards and restaurants frequented by various social classes — capturing the free-spiritedness of bohemian life in late-19th-century France. It is a vision that resists easy categorization, and one that situates him as an artist who, as the critic Jed Perl has observed, “takes his place with Titian, Rubens, Watteau, Matisse and Bonnard among the immortal poets of pleasure.”

^{Pierre-Auguste Renoir, “La Promenade,” 1870. Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 89.PA.41. Image courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum}