London has picked up a Renoir show with a difference. Rather than another broad career retrospective, the Courtauld Gallery's Renoir and Love zooms in on the people who mattered most to the French impressionist: his wife Aline Charigot and their three sons, Pierre, Jean and Claude. It's a family album in oil paint, and that focus is what makes it feel fresh.

The Courtauld is a smart home for it. The gallery already holds some of Renoir's best-loved canvases, including the famous painting of his future wife Aline reading at a café table in the Folies-Bergère, one of the iconic works of impressionism. The exhibition gathers portraits and domestic scenes from across Renoir's career to show how his family served as his most constant — and most affectionate — subjects.

What's interesting is how the show reframes the artist. Renoir is often reduced to sunlit picnics and glamorous Parisian leisure, but this selection centres on a quieter, more personal thread: Aline appears again and again over the decades, and the children grow up on canvas, from babies to young men. Jean Renoir, of course, went on to become one of cinema's great directors, and seeing him captured as a child by his father adds a nice layer for anyone who knows the films.

The Courtauld itself is part of the appeal. It sits in Somerset House on the Strand, a short walk from Covent Garden and the river, and its collection means you can pair the exhibition with Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère and Van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear in the same visit. That's a lot of art history for one ticket.

For travellers, this is an easy win: a compact, single-artist show in central London that doesn't demand a full day, close to tube links at Temple, Charing Cross and Covent Garden, and surrounded by good lunch options. Book timed tickets online to skip the queue, and if you want to stretch the day, Somerset House's riverside terrace and the Southbank walk are right on the doorstep.

If Renoir isn't usually your thing, the family angle may still win you over — it's less about brushwork technique and more about the story of one household in late 19th- and early 20th-century France.

Story via Secret London.