A Pierre-Auguste Renoir exhibition coming to London’s National Gallery (NG) this October has sold over 22,000 tickets in six weeks, achieving a new box office record for the museum. Renoir and Love (3 October-31 January 2027) comes to London following a successful Paris run at the Musée d’Orsay, where it was one of the museum’s most visited exhibitions, according to a press statement.
The ticket sales, which opened to members on 4 August and to the public on 25 August, has surpassed the museum’s record previously set by the 2024 show Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, which sold 15,654 tickets over the same period, according to a museum spokesperson.
The Van Gogh blockbuster currently holds the record for the NG’s most visited ticketed exhibition with 334,589 visits, including a 24-hour-opening over its final weekend, according to the Museums Association website. The Dutch painter also holds the exhibition attendance record for the Musée d’Orsay, with 794,000 for the 2023 show Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise (the Paris museum has yet to publish its 2026 exhibition figures). Whether the French Impressionist will attract more attendees at the NG remains to be seen.
Visitors will be able to see 45 works by Renoir from his early career through the late 1880s. The exhibition is in collaboration with the Musée d’Orsay as well as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), to where the exhibition will travel in February 2027.
“Our partnership with the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 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,” Gabriele Finaldi, the NG’s director, says in a statement. Renoir and Love will be the first NG exhibition to focus on the artist since 2007. One of Renoir’s most well-known paintings, Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (1876) from the Musée d’Orsay’s collection, will be exhibited in the UK for the first time, according to a museum statement.
Despite his fame as part of the Impressionist movement in 19th-century France, Renoir’s oeuvre and biography has long drawn criticism, coming to a head in October 2015 when a protest group called ‘Renoir Sucks at Painting’ demanded that the MFA remove their Renoir paintings. Despite the controversy around his work’s value by artists and critics, the painter has nevertheless become a target for art thieves, with the burglary of the now-recovered Les Poissons (1917) from a foundation in Parma earlier this year, and the theft of two paintings from the Renoir Museum near Nice just last week.
