Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 to 1919) is popularly misunderstood as a slightly dodgy painter of kitsch nudes. Renoir and Love at the National Gallery in London sets the record straight. As Chiara di Stefano, co-curator for the exhibition admits, she grew up “hating Renoir somehow”. She says it can “be troubling for some, especially women viewers, to see his nudes”. These late paintings depict voluptuous women in timeless landscapes, lacking the social context of his earlier work. But this show concentrates on an earlier period of discovery and invention, from his mid 20s to his mid 40s. “The idea was really to let people encounter the works and let the works do the talking by themselves, and understand how innovative and daring he was as a painter, and how he experimented with technique so much in just 20 years,” explains di Stefano.There are numerous excellent loans, and the curators have restricted the selection to the strongest decades of the artist’s work. There are text panels in this exhibition, to frame what is in each room. But they are not long. Renoir’s paintings are allowed to take centre stage, without any other mediation or explanation. For this reason, the visitor is unlikely to leave with a radically revised view of Renoir’s life or politics. They will, however, leave with a deep appreciation for Renoir as an artistic innovator and painter of the first rank.Renoir and Love is an ambitious enterprise, and it is beautifully staged from its first impression. As visitors descend the staircase to the exhibition floor, two of his large dance paintings appear framed through a large open doorway, creating an immediate sense of generous conviviality typical of Renoir’s work. The foyer floor has a mottled light projection redolent of the dappled light in Renoir’s breakthrough impressionist paintings of the late 1860s and early to mid 1870s. The painting that best exemplifies Renoir’s talent is the dazzling canvas of 1876, Dance at the Moulin de la Galette. It’s the first time this painting has been exhibited in London. The presence of this painting is sufficient reason to visit the show – and, for me, it is the highlight. The scale of Dance at the Moulin de la Galette signals Renoir’s ambition. In 1876, a canvas this large was expected to feature polished scenes drawn from history, mythology or the Bible, high-status academic or religious works such as William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Pietà, painted that same year. Renoir described his scene of ordinary residents of working-class Montmartre relaxing as “a page of history”, the history of the people. If you are familiar only with seeing this work in reproduction, the experience of seeing it in the flesh is startling.The painting has a conventional recessional depth: dancing figures get smaller as they recede into the background. But throughout the scene there’s a pattern of broken, dotted light, in a lighter hue than the dominant purply-mauve that ties the scene together, this dappled light comes toward the viewer, like a tangible veil. It is a painting that conveys the immediacy and spatial ambiguity of perception in the moment, as though the viewer has lifted their eyelids on an unfamiliar scene.The feeling of being within the picture is enhanced by other details. There’s a gap in the bottom left of the canvas between two benches, as though the viewer could squeeze their way through to the dance floor. The dancing couple closest to the viewer appears to return the your gaze, as though that person has just arrived. This rippling painting captures the fleeting perception of evanescent leisure.Throughout this period, Renoir painted many scenes of people resting at peak satisfaction immediately after a meal. The earliest such work on display, Mother Anthony’s Tavern (1866), shows a gathering of the painters Alfred Sisley and Jules Le Coeur with another friend Henri Bos. A young woman clears the table. The wall behind them bears a caricature of the writer Henri Murger, author of Scenes of Bohemian Life, the source of Puccini’s opera La Bohème. In front of them is the newspaper L'Événement, which carried writer Emile Zola’s vehement and radical art criticism. This is just part of Renoir’s circle of friends. Much of the love in this show is fraternal.It’s easy to confuse the artist with their work, and to imagine that if someone paints relaxed scenes of post-prandial indulgence, then that must be a reflection of their life. In that case, Renoir’s Self-Portrait of 1875 may come as a shock. The painter appears gaunt, on-edge.Unlike most of the impressionists, Renoir was from a working-class background. His family were skilled artisans. From the age of 14, he painted porcelain for a living, often working from Rococo masters such as Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, echoes of whose work can be seen throughout his oeuvre. Renoir worked in a state of financial precarity until he was in his 50s and – by his own account, which is borne out by correspondence from his friends – there were many occasions on which he did not eat. In this way, he was a man of his time. Renoir’s bohemian contemporaries, from the slightly older Édouard Manet to the writer Émile Zola, depicted the sordid poverty and alienation of modern Paris. But unlike them, and despite being more exposed to the harsh conditions of Paris in the 1860s and 1870s, Renoir’s determination was to show people in their most relaxed and most flattering light.Impressionism appears to us now as though it is a given: a brightly glowing expression of the Belle Époque (1871 to 1914). It is not Renoir’s sole invention, but it is remarkable that this light and joyous movement was developed against the backdrop of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 to 1871. Renoir was drafted, his close friend and supporter Frédéric Bazille was killed, and Camille Pissarro’s early impressionist works were destroyed. Yet on his return to Paris, Renoir continued to paint joyously seductive scenes even though the bitter internal conflict of a civil war in Paris left corpses in the streets. Against this grim backdrop, Renoir chose to focus on the transient joy of life.This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.Benedict Carpenter van Barthold does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.