Two paintings made side by side on the banks of the Seine in the summer of 1869 have been reunited at the National Gallery for the first time in nearly twenty years, in a free display running until 15 September 2026.
Monet and Renoir: Painting Side by Side brings together Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Grenouillère (1869), on loan from the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, and Claude Monet’s Bathers at La Grenouillère (1869) from the National Gallery’s own collection. The two canvases hang together in Room 41, and admission is free to all visitors.
The display opened on 27 July 2026 and serves as a prelude to the Gallery’s major autumn exhibition, Renoir and Love, into which Renoir’s painting will be incorporated from October.
The Summer That Shaped Impressionism
In the summer of 1869 Monet and Renoir were young, ambitious and close friends, and both were more or less broke. They travelled together to La Grenouillère, a fashionable riverside resort on the Seine just outside Paris that combined a floating restaurant, a bathing spot and a boating destination, and which was popular with Parisian society.
Working en plein air, the two artists set up their easels shoulder to shoulder and painted the same lively scene from virtually the same position. Between them they produced six paintings of La Grenouillère that summer, united by bold brushwork, bright colour and a determinedly contemporary subject. The canvases are widely regarded as a defining moment in the birth of Impressionism, capturing a period of intense experimentation in which both painters were working out how to depict modern life rather than mythology or history.
Two Artists, One View, Two Very Different Pictures
Although they painted the same scene from the same spot, the two men reveal markedly different preoccupations, and it is the juxtaposition that makes the display worth seeing.
Monet, who would become one of the greatest landscape painters of his generation, was captivated by the changing effects of light on water. His composition is simplified into broad, fragmented brushstrokes and passages of broken colour, conveying the shimmering reflections of the Seine, with the figures reduced to marks along a jetty.
Renoir, by contrast, was drawn to people. His shorter, more vibrant brushstrokes and softer palette create a flickering, sunlit atmosphere, and his attention settles on the fashionable visitors gathered on the small island at the centre of the canvas.
Seen together, the paintings offer an unusual opportunity to compare two individual styles at the point where they were diverging, and to witness the artistic dialogue between two friends that helped shape one of the most influential movements in Western art. Both works retain the freshness and experimental energy of painters who had no particular reason to believe the approach would succeed.
A Prelude to Renoir and Love
The reunion has a fixed end date because Renoir’s canvas is required elsewhere. Renoir and Love opens on 3 October 2026 and runs until 31 January 2027, gathering around 40 paintings from collections around the world and concentrating on Renoir from the 1860s to the 1880s, the period in which he became an innovator of Impressionism.
The headline loan is Bal au Moulin de la Galette (1876) from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the celebrated Montmartre dance-hall scene, which will be on display in the UK for the first time. The exhibition has been organised jointly by the Musée d’Orsay, the National Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Ticket prices for Renoir and Love had not been announced at the time of writing. Gallery Members go free and receive priority booking, which opens on 4 August 2026.
Planning a Visit
The National Gallery has been free to enter since it was founded by Parliament in 1824, and holds the national collection of paintings in the Western European tradition from the late thirteenth century to the early twentieth, including works by Bellini, Cézanne, Degas, Leonardo, Monet, Raphael, Rembrandt, Renoir, Rubens, Titian, Turner, Van Gogh and Velázquez.
Three further exhibitions overlap with the Monet and Renoir display. Zurbarán, a ticketed exhibition devoted to the seventeenth-century Spanish painter, closes on 23 August 2026. Take One Picture 2026, which shows children’s artwork responding to Canaletto’s A Regatta on the Grand Canal, is free and runs until 31 August. Waldmüller: Landscapes, the first UK exhibition of the Austrian painter Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, is also free and runs until 20 September.
Monet and Renoir: Painting Side by Side is on display in Room 41 at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN, until 15 September 2026. Entry is free.
