NEW YORK, NY.- This fall, the Morgan Library & Museum will present Renoir Drawings, the first comprehensive exhibition in more than a century devoted to the works on paper of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919). On view from October 17, 2025, through February 8, 2026, the exhibition explores Renoir’s engagement with draftsmanship across his long and influential career. Organized with the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Renoir Drawings brings together over one hundred drawings, pastels, watercolors, prints, and paintings, inviting visitors to engage with Renoir’s creative process while offering insights into his artistic methods across five decades.

While Renoir’s paintings have become icons of Impressionism, his drawings are less well- known. Yet beginning in his earliest days as an artist-in-training and continuing until his very last years, Renoir regularly drew and painted on paper in a variety of media. The first comprehensive exhibition devoted to his drawings since Aquarelles, pastels et dessins par Renoir in 1921 at the Galeries Durand-Ruel, in Paris, Renoir Drawings assembles outstanding examples of all the media on paper in which Renoir worked, from pencil, pen and ink, chalk, pastel, and watercolor to etching and lithography.

“Renoir’s drawings reveal an artist of tremendous sensitivity and range,” said Colin B. Bailey, curator of the exhibition and Katharine J. Rayner Director of the Morgan Library & Museum. “This exhibition brings together rarely seen works on paper to provide a more complete view of Renoir’s creative process, offering visitors a fresh perspective on one of the most well-known and influential painters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” Renoir Drawings, the first exhibition at the Morgan to be curated by Dr. Bailey, coincides with his tenth anniversary as its director. He is a noted specialist in eighteenth-century French art and a recognized authority on Renoir.

Renoir Drawings marks the culmination of many years of collaboration between the Morgan and the Musée d’Orsay, combining the Morgan’s dedication to presenting works on paper and records of the creative process with the extraordinary holdings of Renoir’s work from the Musée d’Orsay.

With the exception of the period 1865– 1875, the decade in which Renoir—with Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Camille Pissarro—pioneered the Impressionist method of working directly from nature without preliminary sketches, he created drawings throughout his working life. Thematic sections in the exhibition will cover the full span of Renoir’s career, ranging from academic studies he made as a student to on-the-spot impressions of contemporary urban and rural life, and from finished, formal portraits to intimate sketches of friends and family completed late in life.

Mid-career, Renoir returned to a more traditional practice of preparatory studies. A number of his major paintings, along with one plaster sculpture, are reunited with their related drawings to illustrate his creative process. Inspired by the major gift to the Morgan in 2018 of a large-scale preparatory sketch for one of Renoir’s most significant paintings, The Great Bathers (1886–87), the exhibition presents this painting, on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, alongside seven preparatory drawings. Another of his most ambitious figure paintings, Dance in the Country (1883), is also on view, alongside seven related works on paper.

Other highlights from the exhibition include Renoir’s drawings for publications, including for an illustrated edition of novelist Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir and for the periodical La Vie moderne, showing the ways in which he adapted his technique for different reproduction processes. Also on view are portraits of his inner circle, most notably of his wife, Aline Charigot, as well as of his young sons and their nursemaid, Gabrielle Renard. The exhibition concludes with the plaster sculpture The Judgement of Paris (1914), created in collaboration with sculptor Richard Guino, after arthritis severely limited Renoir’s use of his hands.

Following the installation at the Morgan, Renoir Drawings will be on view at the Musée d’Orsay from March 17 to July 5, 2026.