Best in show | The Umbrellas, 1881-86, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

“Two years ago, we were invited by London’s National Gallery to take part in a project designed to celebrate its bicentenary with the loans of 12 of its most iconic artworks to regional museums.

Leicester Museum & Art Gallery was offered The Umbrellas by Pierre-Auguste Renoir because the painting depicts people in a busy
street and we have a strong reputation for working with communities.

All the project partners went down to London – on the day that Liz Truss resigned as prime minister – to share ideas about how they would use the loans in different ways to attract local audiences.

York Art Gallery is using Claude Monet’s The Water-Lily Pond to explore how people use gardens, while The Fighting Temeraire by JMW Turner leads a voyage into maritime history at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne.

John Constable’s The Hay Wain is the centrepiece of a project looking at agricultural work and landscape at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery; The Wilton Diptych is helping explore the concept of kingship at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford; and an exhibition curated by women about the male gaze at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, is centred around The Rokeby Venus by Diego Velázquez.

We decided to concentrate our efforts on three different audiences: art enthusiasts who jump at the chance to see internationally famous paintings anywhere; people from differing backgrounds who might not be familiar with western art traditions and cultural events; and families with children and grandchildren.

As all three have different needs, we developed the idea of using digital technology and animation as a way of interpreting Renoir’s work with sound and vision painting the proverbial thousand words.

The local animation studio Kino Bino has developed a three-minute story in which Flo – our name for the little girl on the right of the picture – loses her hoop and charges through the streets of Paris looking for it.

She literally bumps into Renoir, who is subsequently inspired to make changes to a sketch he’s producing.

This beautifully explores, in a non-verbal way, the reality that this painting was produced over a period of time during which Renoir changed his mind about some of the details – the people and what they were wearing, for example – and even the painting styles he used.

The section on the right is painted in his characteristic impressionistic hand while the portion on the left is in a more precise, linear style. It’s fascinating to look at.

But just how do you explain that to a five-year-old? This fictional, digital interpretation – along with traditional curatorial labels – enables everyone to enjoy the painting to its fullest extent.

Most people recognise this painting when they see it and this is a great opportunity to present a world-famous artwork and excite a lot of people who would not normally set foot in a gallery.”

Interview by John Holt. All 12 National Treasures exhibitions opened on 10 May, the 200th anniversary of the National Gallery’s opening. Renoir’s Umbrellas will be on show at Leicester Museum & Art Gallery until 1 September