Renoir and Love. A Joyful modernity (1865-1885)

A major figure in impressionism, Pierre Auguste Renoir, like Manet, Degas, Monet and Caillebotte, is regarded as one of the 19th century's great painters of modern life. Between the mid-1860s and the 1880s, he developed a light, fluid manner of painting, bursting with light and color, along with new subjects focusing on relationships between men and women.

This exhibition, co-organized with the National Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, reexamines Renoir's fundamental contributions to impressionism and 19th-century art history through the complex, universal notion of love, the central driving force of his work. It provides a new perspective on paintings that are so well-known that it has become difficult to perceive how radical they are. For the first time since 1985 (the year the last Renoir retrospective was held in Paris, at the Grand Palais), some of the artist's and impressionism's greatest masterpieces will be brought together in France.

Curatorship

Paul Perrin, Chief Curator and Director of Conservation and Collections, Musée d'Orsay;

Christopher Riopelle, Neil Westreich Curator of Post 1800 Paintings, National Gallery, London;

Chiara di Stefano, Associate curator of Post 1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, London;

Katie Hanson, William and Ann Elfers Curator of Paintings, Art of Europe, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston;

• With the participation of

  Lucie Lachenal-Tabellet, Head of Documentary Studies, Musée d'Orsay.