Das vertraute Gespräch

By 1897 Renoir had left the bright, broken light of his Impressionist years behind. He was in his mid-fifties, settling into the warm, reddish manner of his late work, and his hands were beginning to stiffen with the rheumatism that would eventually cripple them. That same year he fell from a bicycle near Essoyes, his wife's home village, and broke his right arm. Here he crops two heads close against a chocolate-brown ground, the profiles overlapping like puzzle pieces while the woman leans in to speak. The light comes from the viewer's side, catching the man's cheek and leaving hers in shadow. The whole scene is held in cream, russet and brown, the reduced palette he now preferred to the open air.