Charles Le Cœur

Before Renoir was Renoir, before the crowded cafe scenes and the sunlit dances, he was a young painter scraping by on the kindness of a few families, and the Le Coeurs were the most important of them. He had befriended the painter Jules Le Coeur in the mid-1860s, and through that family came real work, including a commission to decorate the Paris house of a Romanian prince. This is Jules's brother Charles, an architect who would go on to design several of the city's public high schools. Renoir shows him at ease and middle-aged, hands in his pockets, walking in his own garden at Fontenay-aux-Roses just outside Paris. Up in one corner Renoir brushed in a small joking dedication to his host as the gallant gardener of the place. Within a few years a family falling-out cooled the friendship, and portraits this warm of the Le Coeurs stopped.