Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) stands apart from his Impressionist peers thanks to his distinctive focus on joyful sociability in the modern environment. Friendship, family, and flirtation lie at the heart of his art: he chose love, in all its breadth, and depicted it as happy, discreet, and tender without moralizing or overt anecdote. In scenes that encompass a range of social classes, Renoir captured the people of his own time who, in the artist’s hands, became a subject just as modern as the gardens, streets, cafés, restaurants, and theaters in which he set them.
This exhibition focuses on a period between the mid-1860s and mid-1880s, when a young Renoir explored various sites and scenarios for expression of fond feelings and social interactions in what have come to be regarded as undoubtedly his greatest works. The 40 paintings on view here, gathered from collections in the United States and abroad, celebrate modern spaces and experiences. With its lively crowd carousing on a Sunday afternoon, Dance at Moulin de la Galette (1876) protests the growing loneliness of urban existence. Together with Dance in the Country (1883), its companion from the Musée d’Orsay, the MFA’s Dance at Bougival (1883) suspends an embracing couple mid-twirl, with the world around them in softer focus, hinting at a before and after viewers can only guess at. At Renoir’s Home (1876) invites visitors into the camaraderie of the artist’s studio, while Madame Monet and Her Son (1874) hints at the friendship between Renoir and his fellow artist, whose wife and child relax peacefully in their yard.
The MFA’s first major Renoir exhibition since 1985, “Renoir and Love” sheds fresh light on a painter so popular his innovation has become difficult to discern. It also introduces a new generation of visitors to an artist finely attuned to the complexities, subtleties, and intriguing ambiguities that animate relationships between people and the spaces they inhabit.
