Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) sometimes gets a hard time from critics. Some see indifferent compositions, careless brushwork, overly saturated colours and a sentimental gaze; even in his homeland there has been no large-scale survey of his work for more than four decades. But this exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, which positions him as an Impressionist inheritor of Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard, celebrates his joyous, light-flooded paintings of Paris’s public spaces and suggests that depictions of the relationship between the sexes are more modern than is often assumed (17 March–19 July). The case will be made around the world: the show will travel to the National Gallery in London in October and after that to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Running concurrently with the exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay is ‘Renoir Drawings’, a show of works on paper that has travelled from the Morgan Library & Museum in New York and suggests that draughtsmanship was one of the painter’s more underrated talents (17 March–5 July).
Find out more from the Musée d’Orsay’s website.
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