Coco in a Red Dress

By 1905 Renoir was in his sixties and his hands were stiffening with arthritis, so he had moved south for the warmth, to the hills above Cagnes on the Riviera. This is his youngest son Claude, called Coco, who was about four. It is barely the size of a postcard, one of more than 90 portraits the old painter made of this boy, whose bright red hair he clearly loved to paint. Coco wears a red costume, and the whole small panel is worked in the loose, open brushwork of Renoir's late years, warm and quick. Around this time he was building a house called Les Collettes among the olive trees, where he would keep painting from a wheelchair for the rest of his life.