Porträt der Colonna Romano

By 1912 Renoir was 71 and badly crippled by rheumatoid arthritis. His hands had drawn up into claws, and assistants would wedge the brush between his fingers so he could go on working from a wheelchair in the south of France. This portrait dates from that period. The sitter is Gabrielle Colonna-Romano, a young actress of the Comedie-Francaise who was close to the painter's son Pierre, himself an actor. Renoir gives her a warm red dress and the loose, glowing flesh tones of all his late work, the drawing soft and the paint thin and feathered. In 1916 the picture was placed on long-term loan to the museum in Limoges, the city where Renoir had been born in 1841 before his family moved to Paris. He kept painting almost until his death in 1919.