The National Gallery’s “Renoir and Love” exhibition presents Renoir as an artist of modern life who urges viewers to take pleasure in the present. The review argues that his lively scenes of dancing, dining and flirtation make him more radical than his reputation as a sentimental or kitsch painter suggests, and calls the show the happiest exhibition of the year.

Works including *Dance at Bougival*, *After the Luncheon* and *Dance at the Moulin de la Galette* capture fleeting moments through shifting light and social detail. The exhibition also finds love and intimacy in quieter scenes, including a rainy street and a boatyard by the Seine; it suggests that *The Skiff* may depict a lesbian encounter, though the interpretation is uncertain. Renoir lived from 1841 to 1919, spanning the height and decline of the French bourgeois world whose pleasures his paintings celebrate.