New Melania film features a 'priceless' Renoir on the office wall; real artwork sits in London gallery

A forthcoming film about Melania Trump depicts a Renoir hanging in her New York office, but experts say the work shown in the trailer is not the genuine painting. The scene centers on Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Loge, or The Theatre Box, a 1874 work that shows a fashionable couple at a Paris theater and is widely considered a masterpiece of Impressionism. The film’s producers, however, rely on a depiction that has drawn quick skepticism from art observers who know where the actual painting resides.

The 104-minute feature, Melania, chronicles the 20 days leading up to Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration and is slated for global release on January 30. In the trailer, the First Lady’s gilded New York office features what appears to be a priceless Renoir hanging on the wall. In reality, the genuine La Loge is in the permanent collection of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Over the past two years, the painting has been loaned to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and to The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and it has not been documented as part of a Trump residence’s collection.

A friend of the President told The Mail on Sunday that Trump “loves to flaunt his wealth,” but that the art world can be elitist and insincere. The film’s portrayal of a priceless wall piece has reignited conversations about how high-value art is presented in popular culture and the bidirectional relationship between politics and display.

The public-facing note about La Loge’s presence in the Melania trailer comes amid broader chatter about Renoir’s standing in both real-world markets and media narratives. Experts say that if La Loge were actually in a museum setting, its value would likely surpass £46 million; as a sought-after, highly studied museum work, it remains one of Renoir’s most celebrated canvases. By comparison, contemporary connoisseur-level reproductions can be acquired for far more modest sums—roughly £4,000 for high-quality replicas.

Historical echoes accompany the current conversation. In 2015, journalist Mark Bowden wrote in Vanity Fair about an incident from 1996 in which Trump reportedly displayed a Renoir-like painting on his private Boeing 727 and claimed it was an original worth about $10 million. The painting in question, Two Sisters (On The Terrace), was subsequently identified as belonging to the Art Institute of Chicago, where it has hung since 1933. The episode has been cited by observers as an early example of how art for public display can diverge from provenance records, a point that critics say is relevant to the Melania film’s portrayal as well.

The film Melania is described as a deep-dive portrait of the First Lady during a pivotal political moment. It is produced for a wide audience, with reports noting a substantial payoff for the project, including claims that the subject received about £30 million for participating in the project. Proponents say the film aims to balance intimate, character-focused storytelling with broader public interest in the Trump era, while detractors urge careful attention to how art, wealth and power are depicted on screen.

As the movie world weighs the implications of the trailer’s visual choices, curators and dealers alike emphasize that the real La Loge belongs to a public institution and remains a touchstone of Renoir’s career. The film’s creative team has not released a formal statement about the painting’s depiction beyond what appears in the trailer, and viewers will have to decide for themselves whether the cinematic presentation aligns with art-historical facts. The release date remains January 30, with distribution planned across multiple territories.