Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Ten Most Famous Paintings

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) was a founding member of the Impressionist movement and, of all its painters, the one most devoted to human happiness. Where Monet chased light across haystacks and cathedrals, Renoir chased it across faces, summer dresses, and crowded dance floors. He began his career painting porcelain in a Limoges factory, and something of that delicacy — soft color, luminous skin, a love of decoration — stayed with him for sixty years.

Renoir painted the pleasures of modern Paris: riverside lunches, suburban dance halls, children at the piano, and women in the dappled light of a garden. Later in life, crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, he strapped brushes to his hands and kept painting until the day he died. Here are ten of his most famous works.

Luncheon of the Boating Party

Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–81) is Renoir’s masterpiece and one of the most beloved paintings of the Impressionist era. On the balcony of the Maison Fournaise restaurant on the Seine at Chatou, a group of Renoir’s friends linger over the remains of lunch — among them his future wife Aline Charigot, playing with a small dog in the foreground, and the painter Gustave Caillebotte, seated at right. Every figure is a portrait, the still life of bottles and fruit is a painting in itself, and the whole scene glows with the easy warmth of a summer afternoon.

Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette

Painted in 1876, Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette captures a Sunday afternoon at the open-air dance hall on the hill of Montmartre, where working-class Parisians came to dance, drink, and flirt under the acacia trees. Renoir set up his easel in the garden itself, and the painting is famous for the flickering patches of sunlight that fall through the leaves onto hats, dresses, and faces. It is one of Impressionism’s greatest achievements — a huge, complex crowd scene rendered as a single moment of happiness.

Two Sisters (On the Terrace)

Two Sisters, also known as On the Terrace (1881), shows a young woman in a deep blue flannel dress and a vivid red hat seated on a terrace above the Seine at Chatou, with a little girl in a flowered bonnet beside her and a basket of brightly colored balls of wool at her side. The models were not actually sisters, but the painting’s tenderness and its brilliant contrasts of red, blue, and green made it one of Renoir’s most popular works. It hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago.

Dance at Bougival

Dance at Bougival (1883) is the most famous of three life-size dance paintings Renoir made that year. A couple whirls across the floor of a riverside café outside Paris — the woman in a white dress and red bonnet, modeled by the painter Suzanne Valadon, leaning into her partner’s embrace while the crowd blurs behind them. The movement, the discarded cigarette butts and flowers on the ground, and the sheer pleasure of the scene make it one of the great images of Parisian leisure.

The Umbrellas

The Umbrellas (c. 1881–86) is a fascinating painting because Renoir changed styles in the middle of it. A Parisian street crowd shelters beneath a canopy of blue-gray umbrellas; the little girl with a hoop at right is painted in his soft, feathery Impressionist manner, while the woman with the bandbox at left — finished several years later, after Renoir had studied Italian Renaissance painting — is crisp, sculptural, and sharply outlined. The result is a single canvas that records the turning point in his career.

Girls at the Piano

Girls at the Piano (1892) was commissioned by the French state for the new Musée du Luxembourg, and Renoir, anxious to get it right, painted at least six versions. Two girls — one in white, one in pink — lean over the keyboard in a comfortable bourgeois interior, their concentration and closeness rendered in warm, flowing color. The painting became one of the most popular images of 19th-century domestic life and is one of Renoir’s most frequently reproduced works.

The Swing

The Swing (1876) was painted in the garden of Renoir’s studio on the rue Cortot in Montmartre, the same summer as Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette. A young woman in a white dress with blue bows stands on a swing, turning shyly from a man in a straw hat while a small child looks on. The painting is best known for the blotches of sunlight on the path and the figures’ clothing — an effect that critics at the time mocked as grease stains and that is now recognized as one of the purest statements of Impressionist light.

La Grenouillère

In the summer of 1869 Renoir and Claude Monet set up their easels side by side at La Grenouillère, a popular bathing spot and floating café on the Seine near Bougival, and painted the same view. The pictures they produced are often described as the birth of Impressionism: quick, broken brushstrokes, sunlight shattered on the water, and the bustle of modern leisure captured on the spot. Renoir’s version is warmer and more crowded with people than Monet’s — a difference that would define the two painters for the rest of their lives.

Madame Charpentier and Her Children

This 1878 portrait of Marguerite Charpentier, wife of the influential publisher Georges Charpentier, with her two children and the family’s Newfoundland dog, was the painting that made Renoir’s reputation. Shown at the official Salon of 1879 thanks to Madame Charpentier’s connections, it was a critical and social triumph. The fashionable Japanese-style interior, the children’s matching blue-and-white dresses, and the relaxed elegance of the group mark Renoir at the peak of his powers as a society portraitist.

A Girl with a Watering Can

A Girl with a Watering Can (1876) is one of Renoir’s most charming paintings of childhood. A small girl in a blue dress trimmed with lace, a red bow in her blonde hair, stands on a garden path holding a green watering can and a few daisies, surrounded by a blur of flowers and foliage. Renoir painted children with unusual sympathy — never sentimental, always alive — and this picture, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, is the most famous example.

Renoir once said that a painting should be “something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty — yes, pretty.” More than a century later, his sunlit dance halls, riverside lunches, and luminous portraits remain some of the most welcoming images ever put on canvas, and among the most popular for the home. Every painting in this list is available as a museum-quality print — on paper, canvas, metal, or acrylic, framed or unframed.

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