Erdbeeren

Renoir was in his mid-sixties when he set out this dish of strawberries, around 1905, and his hands were failing him. Rheumatoid arthritis had twisted his fingers so badly that he worked from a wheelchair in the warm south of France, at Cagnes near the Mediterranean, sometimes with the brush wedged between his stiffened knuckles. He liked painting fruit and flowers in these years because, he said, he could take risks with them that he wouldn't dare with a portrait. So the strawberries sit loosely in a dish on a creased white cloth, their red built from quick warm strokes rather than careful outlines. It is a small canvas, the work of a painter who could barely move but had lost none of his feeling for colour.