Renoir Drawing To Take Center Stage at The Morgan Library & Museum I M.S. Rau

For over a century, the world has celebrated Pierre-Auguste Renoir as one of Impressionism's greatest masters. His luminous canvases of modern life, sun-dappled landscapes and sensuous figures have become synonymous with the movement itself.

Renoir Drawings, Published by the Morgan Library & Museum in association with the Musée d’Orsay, RMN-Grand Palais, and DelMonico Books. 2025. Source.

Yet there exists an entire dimension of Renoir's artistic practice that has remained largely unexplored: his profound and prolific work on paper. This fall, The Morgan Library & Museum rectifies this oversight with Renoir Drawings, a landmark exhibition that offers an unprecedented look at the artist's creative process through nearly one hundred drawings, pastels, watercolors and prints spanning five decades of his career.

Groundbreaking Exhibition:

Study for The Great Bathers by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. ca. 1886-1887 and 1908. The Morgan Library. Source.

Opening October 17, 2025, and running through February 8, 2026, this ambitious exhibition is the first major exploration of Renoir's works on paper in a century. Organized jointly by The Morgan Library & Museum and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the show illuminates how drawing remained central to Renoir's artistic practice even as his interests evolved from academic studies to Impressionist spontaneity to classical revival. The presentation was inspired by a major gift to The Morgan of a large-scale preparatory sketch for The Great Bathers, one of Renoir's most significant paintings, and traces the artist's engagement with paper as a medium for testing ideas, planning compositions and interpreting both landscape and the human figure.

Early sections present his academic studies as a student at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he trained under Charles Gleyre alongside Claude Monet and other future Impressionists. These works reveal the strong classical foundation that would distinguish Renoir from his peers throughout his career.

The exhibition then moves through Renoir's Impressionist period, featuring on-the-spot impressions of contemporary urban and rural life that capture the spontaneity and immediacy the movement prized. These sketches and studies demonstrate how Renoir used paper to work out ideas quickly, experimenting with composition and capturing fleeting effects of light before committing them to canvas.

NYC and New Orleans Converge:

Après le bain by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Circa 1898. M.S. Rau.

M.S. Rau is honored to have a significant work included in this historic exhibition: Renoir's Après le bain (After the Bath). Executed in sanguine and white chalk on Western wove paper stretched over canvas, this compelling portrait presents a nude woman absorbed in the intimate act of drying herself after bathing. The choice of sanguine—a reddish-brown chalk favored by Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael during the Renaissance—connects Renoir directly to the masters he studied in Italy. Its warm hue proves ideal for depicting the warmth of the figure, while the chalk medium allows greater focus on line, form and texture rather than the color and light that typically preoccupied the Impressionists.

Gabrielle Aux Grenades by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Painted 1915. M.S. Rau (sold).

The elegant lines of the sitter's form seem captured at the precise moment before she shifts position, creating a sense of vitality in an otherwise ordinary scene. The model is almost certainly Gabrielle Renard, cousin to Renoir's wife Aline and nanny to their children.

Gabrielle à la rose by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Painted 1911. Musée d’Orsay. Source.

Gabrielle came to work for the family in Montmartre at age sixteen and quickly became one of the artist's favorite subjects, appearing in several important works, including the 1911 Gabrielle with a Rose now in the Musée d'Orsay. When severe rheumatoid arthritis eventually left him unable to walk and barely able to grasp a paintbrush, it was Gabrielle who assisted by positioning the brush between his stiffened fingers, enabling him to continue working.

Why you should make the trip:

The Morgan Library, 225 Madison Avenue in New York City. 2025. Source.

The great Morgan Library & Museum began as the personal library of financier and collector John Pierpont Morgan, known as J.P. Morgan, between 1902 and 1906. The institution has maintained its commitment to fine art, specifically important works on paper, since its transformation into a public institution in 1924. The museum's intimate galleries, housed in Charles McKim's Italian Renaissance-style palazzo, provide the perfect setting for close examination of Renoir's studies, among many other rare books and artifacts.

Whether you are a devoted student of Impressionism or simply appreciate masterful draftsmanship, Renoir Drawings offers a fresh perspective on an artist whose paintings have become so familiar that we sometimes forget to see them anew. This exhibition reminds us that behind every luminous canvas lies hours of careful study, experimentation and refinement captured in drawings that are masterworks in their own right.

Renoir Drawings runs October 17, 2025, through February 8, 2026, at The Morgan Library & Museum, located at 225 Madison Avenue in New York City.

RECENTLY POSTED ARTICLES