Renoir’s Long-Hidden Drawings Return to the Spotlight After 100 Years

Earlier this year, a woman in Pennsylvania bought a nude charcoal sketch for $12 at a local art auction. Something about the depicted woman’s downward gaze, the hang of flesh around her waist seemed familiar, and so she got in touch with an appraiser. “Congratulations,” they responded—she’d snagged a Pierre-Auguste Renoir drawing. It may now be worth six figures.

The story of work by a celebrated artist being unwittingly rediscovered is hardly uncommon, but in the case of a Renoir drawing, it’s somewhat telling: it’s a part of his practice that’s been largely overlooked by collectors and curators alike. In fact, the last time a show dedicated to Renoir’s works on paper was staged, it was 1921 and the one-time Impressionist was only two years dead.

This fall, the Morgan Museum and Library is breaking the dry spell with “Renoir Drawings,” which as advertised will bring together more than 100 drawings, pastels, watercolors, and prints by the 19th- and 20th-century artist.

One reason for the lack of attention paid to Renoir’s drawings may simply be the preponderance of his paintings. Renoir lived long and worked continuously; conservative estimates suggest he produced around 4,000 paintings, spanning his Impressionist forays alongside Monet , before enjoying various stints channeling Classicism, Rubens, Titian, florid 18th-century French art, and his own kind of modernism in later life experiments. There is, in short, much to pick through. A premise of the Morgan show is that the drawings can help us understand these phases—except, perhaps, that fabled decade when Renoir painted boats and bathers and without preliminary sketches.

“Unlike Degas or Cezanne, Renoir’s use of drawing was episodic and only quite recently has his corpus of works on paper been catalogued,” Colin Bailey, the show’s curator, said over email, noting that there may be as many of 1,000 works on paper, some of which have not yet been located. Renoir’s early innovation may have been to throw sense and intuition directly onto the canvas, but he would return to drawing in more measured times. “Having trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in the early 1860s, he always regarded drawing as foundational and we see this particularly in his return to drawing in the late 1870s and 1880s.”

Bailey, who is enjoying his tenth year as the Morgan’s director, has been working on Renoir for three decades and has seen the institution add to its collection of Renoir works on paper. Nonetheless, the show has necessitated major loans, including from the MFA Boston, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Vienna’s Albertina Museum, and most numerously from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, which has been a collaborative partner on the exhibition and will go on to stage “Renoir Drawings” from March to July in 2026.

Organized thematically, the show will cover Renoir’s academic studies, sketches of modern life, and portraits, both formal and casual. At its most literal, the exhibition will reunite Renoir’s finished works with their preparatory drawings; here, the Musée d’Orsay provides two key works: (1883) and (1914). In the first, we see Renoir tiptoeing away from Impressionism in a style of greater clarity. The painting is accompanied by studies that see him testing out background details and just how joyful his female dancer should be. The second belongs to the sculptural works Renoir made alongside Richard Guino in the early 20th century. Accompanying chalk drawings show Renoir working over the choreography of the classical scene.

One highlight promises to be the presentation of (1884–87), on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and placed alongside seven preparatory drawings. The work was a slog and saw Renoir trying to assimilate elements of sculpture, 18th-century French painting, and the modern treatment of water and greenery he was well-versed in. It was broadly panned by critics upon its unveiling and Renoir never again spent so long on a single painting.

The painting is making its first appearance in New York and it was the accession of the large red-and-white chalk preparatory drawing in 2018 that provided the first spark for the exhibition. There’s the sense that Renoir’s drawings haven’t been given a chance, something Bailey explains by way of an anecdote.

“In 1886, Berthe Morisot was treated to a private viewing of Renoir’s drawings. She was most impressed and noted in her diary that it would be most desirable for the public, who thought the Impressionists worked with the greatest casualness, to see such drawings,” Bailey said. “In some ways, our exhibition is a response to her insight.”

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com