Renoir’s Dance at the Moulin de la Galette is shown in Britain for the first time from Saturday 3 October. It is the centre of Renoir and Love at the National Gallery in London, 45 works from the 1860s to the 1880s that the gallery calls the most significant exhibition of the painter’s work in the UK for 20 years. The canvas is large. At 131.5 by 176.5 centimetres, it shows the dance garden on the Butte Montmartre in 1876, a crowd in motion under natural and artificial light. The public has already answered. By September, 22,033 tickets had been booked in advance, a record for the gallery. The show runs until 31 January 2027 in the Sainsbury Wing, after its run at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and before a last stop in Boston.
Forty-five works and a record
Renoir and Love is the first exhibition devoted to the artist at the National Gallery since 2007, and it covers the two decades in which he became one of the innovators of Impressionism, from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s. Its subject is in the title. “More than one third of the canvasses he painted in these two pivotal decades are scenes of modern love and social interactions,” the gallery writes. The advance bookings, 22,033 by September, beat the record set in 2024 by Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, which had 15,654 tickets booked over the same period. Members could book from 4 August and the public from 25 August. In Paris, where the show opened in March as Renoir et l’amour, the gallery says it was one of the most visited exhibitions in the history of the Musée d’Orsay.
The first time in Britain
The Musée d’Orsay calls Bal du moulin de la Galette “doubtless Renoir’s most important work of the mid 1870’s”. It was shown at the Impressionist exhibition of 1877, and it was bought by the painter Gustave Caillebotte, who left it to the French state with his collection; it entered the national collections in 1896. It hung at the Musée du Luxembourg, then at the Louvre from 1929 and at the Jeu de Paume from 1947, and it has been at the Orsay since 1986. “Though some of his friends appear in the picture, Renoir’s main aim was to convey the vivacious and joyful atmosphere of this popular dance garden on the Butte Montmartre,” the museum writes, calling it “one of the masterpieces of early Impressionism”. This is its first showing in the UK.
“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.” Christopher Riopelle, co-curator of Renoir and Love, the National Gallery.
From Chatou to the theatre box
The loans come from Europe and the United States. From the Orsay itself, besides the Moulin de la Galette, come Dance in the Country of 1883 and Motherhood of 1885; from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Dance at Bougival of 1883. The Art Institute of Chicago lends Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise, the National Gallery of Art in Washington Oarsmen at Chatou, and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia Leaving the Conservatory, The Luncheon and Young Mother. Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum sends Mother Antony’s Tavern of 1866 and The Conversation, the Getty The Promenade, the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge La Place Clichy, the Clark Art Institute A Box at the Theatre, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art The Great Bathers. The National Gallery adds its own The Umbrellas, painted in 1881 and reworked in 1885. The rooms move from the early years to the gallant scenes of the 1870s, the streets and cafés, the outskirts of Paris, family life and the intimacy of the theatre box.
Paris, London, Boston
The show is a partnership between the Musée d’Orsay, the National Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where it opens on 20 February 2027. In London the curators are Christopher Riopelle and Chiara Di Stefano. “Eschewing anecdote, drama or sentimentality, Renoir sketches a joyful and light-hearted portrait of modern romance in 19th-century Paris, where the celebration of youth, beauty and sensual pleasure takes centre stage,” Di Stefano says. Gabriele Finaldi, the gallery’s director, said the partnership is “enabling us to bring the very best of Renoir to the UK in one of the most important exhibitions of his work in decades”. Tickets cost £20 from Sunday to Thursday and £25 on Fridays, Saturdays and every day of the first two weeks; under-18s go free, and from 23 October Friday evenings are pay what you wish, from £1.
A season for Renoir
The record says something about the moment. Renoir and Love is an exhibition about happiness: in Paris its subtitle was La modernité heureuse, happy modernity, for the two decades from 1865 to 1885. It opens in a full London season. The Royal Academy opens Painting the French Riviera on Friday 2 October, and Frieze Masters follows in Regent’s Park from 14 to 18 October. The show makes the case for the young painter of the 1860s and 1870s, the one who painted crowds, dancers, rowers and lovers in the open air. The numbers suggest the public was waiting for it.
The Luxury.it perspective
Some paintings are worth a trip, and for once the painting has made the trip. Dance at the Moulin de la Galette has never been shown in Britain before, and there is no guarantee it will be again. The advice is practical. Book now, avoid the first two weeks if price matters, and take a Friday evening from 23 October, when the gallery stays open until nine and entry to the show is pay what you wish. Then walk out onto Trafalgar Square with the Montmartre of 1876 in your head. Few autumn evenings in London will offer more for so little, and the record bookings suggest many people have already worked that out.
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