Renoir show sets National Gallery advance ticket record
More than 22,000 tickets are already gone for Renoir and Love at the National Gallery in London, a new advance-sales record for the museum.
The figure covers six weeks of sales ahead of the October opening, The Art Newspaper reported on 15 September. It beats the gallery's previous best for the same pre-opening window.
That record belonged to Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers in 2024, with 15,654 advance tickets. That Van Gogh show went on to draw 334,589 visits, the highest total for any ticketed exhibition at the gallery.
Renoir and Love runs from 3 October 2026 to 31 January 2027. It is the gallery's first exhibition devoted to French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir since 2007.
The show brings together 45 works from Renoir's early career through the late 1880s. It is organised in collaboration with the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
The headline loan is Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (1876) from the Musée d'Orsay. It will be shown in the United Kingdom for the first time.
What makes this stand out is the timing. Members' booking opened on 4 August, with public booking following on 25 August. The gallery still has almost three weeks to sell before the doors open.
After London, the exhibition will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in February 2027. The Paris edition at the Musée d'Orsay ran from March to July 2026.
Booking is now open, according to the National Gallery. Standard tickets are £20 off-peak from Sunday to Thursday, and £25 on Fridays and Saturdays and on all days in the first two weeks.
