Pierre-Auguste Renoir's art teacher once scolded him for painting purely for his own pleasure. His reply, as the story goes: if he didn't enjoy it, he wouldn't do it. That spirit of joy runs through a new National Gallery exhibition in London, which gathers works from the two decades between 1860 and 1880 — the period when Renoir experimented his way into becoming one of the founding figures of Impressionism.
The show arrives with a short film from the National Gallery that doubles as a portrait of both the painter and the city he adopted. Paris in Renoir's lifetime was being rebuilt and reinvented, becoming the modern metropolis of the late 19th century. Where contemporaries like Dickens in literature confronted the grime and hardship of urban life head-on, Renoir chose a different lens entirely. His canvases are filled with friends, family, lovers, dances and dinners — the gritty realities of the city barely register.
That has earned him criticism over the years. Detractors have suggested that a painter of happy scenes is somehow a frivolous one, less serious than peers who tackled social darkness. The counter-argument, and the one the National Gallery leans into, is that his focus was deliberate and arguably deeper than it looks: he was obsessed with love, with how people socialise, and with the culture we build around food — what we eat, how we eat it, and who's around the table. Many of his best-known paintings centre on meals, and intriguingly, most of them depict the meal already over, the plates cleared and conversation in full flow.
The highlight for most visitors will be Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, widely considered his masterpiece. It captures an open-air dance in Montmartre, all dappled light and circulating couples, and it's the clearest statement of what Renoir was after: not a documentary of Paris, but a record of what it feels like to be happy in it.
For travellers, this is a good excuse to build a London trip around art. The National Gallery sits on Trafalgar Square, free to enter for the permanent collection, with ticketed exhibitions like this one. Pair a visit with a walk through the gallery's other Impressionist holdings, then keep the thread going across the Channel — the real Moulin de la Galette still stands in Montmartre, and Paris's Musée d'Orsay holds a superb trove of Renoirs a short train ride away. Whether you think Renoir was dodging reality or distilling it, seeing these early works in one place makes the case for the painter who decided, against the grain of his era, that pleasure was a subject serious enough to devote a life to.
