Claude Renoir, playing

Renoir painted his youngest son here around 1905, when the boy, Claude, called Coco in the family, was about four. He is bent over a table of little lead soldiers, which the dealer Vollard remembered scattered right across the studio floor. By this date Renoir's hands were badly crippled by arthritis and he worked in the warmth of the south of France, yet the touch stays soft and quick, the background barely brushed in while all the care settles on the child's face and hair. Renoir liked to keep his boys' hair long, he claimed to guard them from knocks, though really for the pleasure of painting it. Coco was the last of the models the ageing painter had always to hand.