Coco (Claude Renoir)

When Renoir's sons were small they wore their hair long, and that is how they appear in many of his pictures. Here the curls are gone. Claude, the youngest, called Coco at home, is nine, and the Museum of Fine Arts points out that he has the cropped, tousled haircut of an elementary schoolboy and the regulation shorts that went with it. Renoir was 69, and he followed this child of his old age as he grew, in the plump, rosy manner of his late pictures. He never sold this one. The signature at the lower left is a stamp, added by his estate after his death in 1919, and in 1931 the canvas appeared in a published catalogue of what had been left in his studio. In 1934 it hung in Paris in an exhibition of work from his last ten years. The next year a Boston collector, Katherine Putnam, bought it through a New York gallery, and she gave it to the museum in 1973.