Trump loves Renoir – and so do I ...Middle East

It’s not easy being a fan of Renoir, painter of golden-haired children and rosy-cheeked women – the latter of whom beam, dance and flirt demurely, all while dressed up like cakes in a patisserie window. Renoir Sucks at Painting, an Instagram account with 17.8K followers, accuses the French impressionist of sentimentality, “craven mediocrity”, and even misogyny; his admirers include Donald Trump and the Nazis. When thieves dropped two of the four Renoirs they were stealing from a French museum earlier this month, it was uncharitably suggested that perhaps they had regretted their selection.

Mocking Renoir may be de rigueur, but it’s far from new. Degas had mixed feelings, and the trailblazing US impressionist Mary Cassatt bemoaned his “enormously fat red women with very small heads”.

Here it’s hard to disagree – even the most loyal admirer of Renoir comes unstuck faced with the strangely passive, ill-formed and off-colour nudes that preoccupied him in his later years, and are best dismissed as the overripe indulgences of an old and arthritic man. It’s no wonder that the National Gallery does the diplomatic thing and ends its new show, its first on Renoir in 20 years, in the 1880s, just as that phase of Renoir’s career was warming up.

Perhaps counterintuitively given the title, Renoir and Love includes only a few nudes. But then this is a painter who treats sexual love in the most innocent terms and the exhibition, organised in partnership with the Musée d’Orsay, Paris and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is designed accordingly, with walls the colour of sugared almonds and the sounds of birdsong piped into the galleries.

Even so, the exhibition presents a series of gentle but well-aimed challenges to Renoir sceptics, beginning in room one, where we meet the artist in a world emptied of the powder puff colours that became his signature. The almost monochrome portrait of his friend the painter Frédéric Bazille absorbed in his work is unarguably accomplished, reminiscent of consummate portraitist Manet, who it turns out was the painting’s first owner. Here too is Renoir’s own earnest, nervy self-portrait, his gaunt face remarkably at odds with the pleasure-seeking persona evoked by his paintings.

Underlining Renoir’s overlooked facility with neutral shades of grey, brown, and blue, the view from room one brings us face to face with one of his most original paintings, the National Gallery’s own The Umbrellas (c 1881-86). Here Renoir directs our gaze through the crowd, suggesting but not insisting on narrative possibilities involving the four foreground figures. Most of all, the angular, interlinking surfaces of the umbrellas bring to mind the mould-breaking geometry of Cézanne, and the fragmentation of the image that followed with the cubism of Picasso and Braque.

The exhibition spans the three best decades of Renoir’s career, and its 45 paintings include several of his finest, of which the highlight is the Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (1876), here in the UK for the first time. This feast of a picture is surely the stiffest challenge for Renoir naysayers, not least because it exposes the most ill-founded of objections made against him. It shows a Sunday afternoon dance at the famous open-air café in Montmartre, which was popular with working class customers, as well as the bohemian crowd of which Renoir and his friends, some of whom are models here, belonged.

This painting was the first that really absorbed my interest as a child, when I saw it in a book. I, like many, I am sure, was captivated by this convivial scene, which contains in its sense of unfettered joy and freedom much of what makes the adult world seductive and mysterious to the very young.

Renoir’s appeal to young and untutored eyes works against him in the harshest way – his refusal to engage with the seamier aspects of 19th century Paris life makes him appear shallow and unsophisticated next to more risqué depictions of urban alienation by Manet, for example. He is simply not cynical enough to align with crudely formed ideas of what it is to be modern and intellectual. If you like Renoir, the implication is that you probably don’t know any better.

Renoir understood perfectly: “I know it’s hard to get people to admit that a painting can be a great painting and still be happy,” he said.

The scale of Dance at the Moulin de la Galette is the first hint that this is more than a sentimental and vaguely titillating scene of pretty young people enjoying themselves. It is a big picture – the best part of two metres wide and over one metre high – far bigger than was usual for such frivolous subject matter, making Renoir’s celebration of youth, joy, dancing and leisure all the more emphatic.

It is a deeply sensuous painting, that as it directs our eyes from one smiling couple to another, leads us through and further into the dance as if we are part of it. And though of course every painting is fiction, this has no less legitimacy as a scene of Paris life than the seedier interpretations of Degas, Manet and the novelist Émile Zola. The difference is that in its scale and its exuberance, it not only treats working class lives with respect, allowing them the freedom and pleasure that Manet only affords the middle classes, but also makes us as viewers comfortably a part of their world.

Renoir allows young women to occupy space in the world. Even when they sit alone in a bar, they are not isolated, but part of a continuous social fabric.

It is true that many of Renoir’s paintings of women are uncomfortable to look at – in After the Luncheon (1879), for example, two dead-eyed beauties are effectively part of the background decoration. Conversation (1878), does something else entirely, and presents the woman facing away from us, as someone not to lust after, but to listen to.

This rather unexpected sense of a relationship of equals between the sexes occurs also in restaurant scenes, which don’t discount an amorous encounter, but emphasise the breadth of Renoir’s understanding of love, felt sincerely between family and friends, as much as between lovers.

In later years he tried to moderate the fleeting, ephemeral effects of impressionism with a weightier, more linear style, but his most successful pictures have a photographic quality, and often he crops a scene just as we might do with a camera.

To the charge that Renoir simply “sucks at painting”, this exhibition makes clear that yes, at times he did. A small Portrait of a Young Man and a Young Woman (1876) is dismayingly bad, with the pudgy misshapen faces and blurred features that so often attract derision.

Often, as in this case, Renoir was clearly experimenting, and he wasn’t afraid to get it wrong. You can see his determination to capture a moment that is over in the same instant that it happens, in his study of a nude woman in the sun, shown at the second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876. A critic said it looked like “a mass of rotting flesh”, but to me it emphasises just how new and uncharted – and difficult – the impressionist project was. To Renoir, painters “honestly tried to put a little gaiety on the wall – and that was all”. To me, he achieved that, and more.

‘Renoir and Love’ is at the National Gallery, London, to 31 January 2027

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