See Renoir’s Rare Drawings on Display in the First Exhibition of Its Kind Since 1921

Around 100 of the French Impressionist painter’s lesser-known paper works are now on view at New York City’s Morgan Library and Museum

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

October 22, 2025

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For the first time in more than a century, an exhibition dedicated to the lesser-known paper-based works of famed French Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir has opened to the public.

About 100 drawings, sketches, lithographs, watercolors and pastels are on display in New York City’s Morgan Library and Museum, which opened the show “Renoir Drawings” on October 17.

The collection showcases a new side to the artist, who is famous for paintings such as La Grenouillère (1869), Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (1876) and Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880-81). But Renoir’s rarer works on paper are stylistic departures from his famous canvases marked by wispy brushwork. The last time many of his drawings were displayed together was during a 1921 show at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris.

“Because they are works on paper, they are not exhibited permanently in any institution,” Colin Bailey, the exhibition’s curator and director of the Morgan, tells the Guardian’s David Smith. “Having access to watercolors and pastels and red chalk and white chalk expands your knowledge of the artist. While these will seem very Renoir-esque, they will be less familiar.”

Inspiration for the exhibition struck Bailey seven years ago, when the Morgan was given a red-and-white chalk study that Renoir completed while working on one of his most iconic paintings, The Great Bathers (1884-87). He once called drawing “the soul of painting,” writes Galerie magazine’s Gogo Taubman.

Visitors to “Renoir Drawings” will learn about the process Renoir engaged in to produce The Great Bathers and other well-known works. Some of these sketches are informal, completed on pages torn from sketchbooks. Others were done after a painting was already finished, serving as an analysis of sorts.

“His method changes all the time; he experiments,” Paul Perrin, chief curator and director of conservation and collections at the Musée d’Orsay, tells the New York Times’ Dale Berning Sawa. “There is gesture and flexibility and fluidity and lightness.”

The drawings span Renoir’s entire career, from works completed as a young student to those finished later in life. They also add insight into the artist’s private affairs. Family friends and close acquaintances were often a subject of his sketches, as were off-the-cuff moments he wanted to capture.

In the 1870s, Renoir completed portraits on commission and drew for weekly publications, magazines and other literary works. In 1885, he began to produce drawings of Aline Charigot, his partner and eventual wife, and later of Pierre, his son.

The merit of Renoir’s drawings has long been debated. In 1874, the art critic Louis Leroy wrote, “It’s too bad that the painter, who has some understanding of color, cannot draw better,” per the Times. Meanwhile, artist and colleague Berthe Morisot called Renoir a “draftsman of the first order” in 1886. French painter Paul Gauguin took the middle ground in 1902, writing that Renoir was “a painter who never knew how to draw but who draws well.”

After the exhibition ends at the Morgan, it will travel to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where it will be shown from March through July.

Paris seems a fitting destination for the collection of drawings, which together describe “something so joyful and so Parisian,” Bailey tells CNN’s Jane Levere. “He gives you the sense of the delights of being free and young and in love in Paris. Renoir captures that.”

“Renoir Drawings” is on view at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City through February 8, 2026. It will then travel to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris from March 17 to July 5, 2026.

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Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.