Renoir’s endless promenade

Paris during Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s youth must have been a place of tumult. At the time when he was exhibiting his earliest works, in the later 1860s, the city was still undergoing the travaux haussmanniens, the vast project to streamline the capital’s street plan and homogenise its architecture. Squalid, tightly cramped medieval buildings were in the process of being demolished, with elegant neoclassical apartment blocks constructed on wide boulevards in their place. It is hard to imagine the noise, the clouds of dust, the gaping holes on every street, the ubiquitous scaffolding, and the deep trenches being dug for much-needed sewers as an entire city centre was transformed in one fell swoop.

One contemporary French painter, Gustave Caillebotte, made a point of documenting the newly gleaming city. Renoir, by contrast, was less impressed by its makeover, mourning the ‘vieux Paris’ of his childhood and calling the new buildings ‘cold and lined up like soldiers on parade’. Only rarely, as in The Grands Boulevards, does one of his paintings focus upon Haussmannian architecture explicitly, and even then the buildings are largely concealed by trees.

Instead, he depicts Paris’s inhabitants, often squeezing them up close to the very edge of the frame so we see nothing of the cityscape behind them. Only when Renoir steps out of the city, and joins the day-trippers in Chatou or Bougival, pleasure spots beside the Seine west of Paris, does he allow his focus to zoom out.

The National Gallery’s new exhibition Renoir and Love arrives this month in London from Paris, where it was first on display at the Musée d’Orsay; in February it will continue its journey to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Given Paris’ over-egged reputation as the ‘city of love’, the marketing hook must have seemed irresistible but is somewhat misleading. Yes, there are paintings here of courting couples, mothers and babies, cherished children and – using the word love euphemistically, perhaps – the frolicking nudes of the maligned but hugely influential The Large Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses), which hangs in isolation at the exhibition’s end. But there are also plenty which are not in any plausible sense concerned with love: a lone figure on a riverbank, two young women in a busy street, customers in a hat shop. Speculating that the two women in The Skiff (La Yole) could be a lesbian couple seems like clutching at straws, and the man leaning forward in The Umbrellas might be about to make a pass, or on the other hand might not.

Once the curators have seduced you with the promise of romance, their emphasis shifts. The exhibition’s principal focus is not so much love as sociability: how a society is held together by communal interactions, in pairs, in small gatherings, and in large groups. Paris was a city of 20,000 cafés and countless restaurants and Renoir developed a particular line in informal dinner scenes, usually capturing his subjects as a meal drew to its conclusion, once everyone was nicely relaxed, perhaps somewhat inebriated. But it is not always his oh-so characteristically sweet-faced diners who command our attention so much as the tableware – glasses containing a final slug of red wine, a glancing reflection of light on a carafe, the fine paintwork on a teacup. Renoir, we recall, served his artistic apprenticeship at a porcelain factory.

There are party scenes too, of course. In his book City of Light,  the cultural historian Rupert Christiansen characterises mid-19th century Paris as ‘a ceaseless carnival’, which acted as ‘catnip for the strait-laced, the pious and the hypocritical’. When painting a group of revellers on a small islet on the Seine in La Grenouillère, Renoir himself remarked that: ‘It was a perpetual party, and what an assortment of people!’ The centrepiece of this exhibition is Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, a painting familiar from countless greetings cards, mugs and jigsaws, yet on display in Britain for the first time. Seeing it in person, you admire Renoir’s vivid evocation of movement and hubbub, imagining the raised voices and music of the dance hall drowning out the distant hum of construction noise from Paris, into which the village of Montmartre had only recently been incorporated.

You also notice that the characters in the foreground, some of them Renoir’s real-life-friends, seem oddly disconnected. Each person looks wrapped up in their own world and Renoir has not succeeded in drawing a convincing glance or conversation between any of them. This impression is repeated throughout the exhibition, as you gradually begin to realise that painting after painting features blank-faced protagonists, who stare ahead or look right past each other.

The most convincing sense of intimacy can be found in paintings where Renoir has been less than precise in his brushwork: the more that is withheld, strangely, the stronger the sense of connection. There is a hint of sensuality to View of Bougival, ostensibly just a riverside vista, but with a tiny couple at its centre, her back to us, his face a mere smudge. Even more compelling is an unfinished work called At the Fireplace. So impressionistic is this hastily painted piece that a seated woman and a standing man are essentially faceless and yet somehow there seems to be more character here than in any of Renoir’s more ‘perfect’ works. Evocative, too, is Bouquet in a Theatre Box, a close-up of a paper-wrapped bouquet of delicate pink roses on a red velvet chair. Whether it is about to be picked up by a delighted recipient or has been cast aside in disgust is unclear.

We must assume the former, for Renoir does not do sorrow, or angst, or even disagreement. His approach to art is relentlessly optimistic, with his hopeful portraits of bright-eyed teenagers in their best dresses on a first visit to the theatre, of people sharing a beer, and of dancers whirling the night away on a site that only a few years previously had witnessed the bloody events of the Commune. Although Renoir’s sociability can sometimes feel strangely impersonal, there is plenty of enjoyment to be found here if you are willing to embrace the joyful vision of a master who could hold on to the small pleasures of life in a city that had recently been both a building site and a battlefield.

Renoir and Love is at the National Gallery in London until 31 January 2027. It will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston from 20 February to 13 June 2027.