Coco Reading

The child is Claude Renoir, the painter's third and youngest son, born in 1901 and called Coco by everyone, so he's about four here, absorbed in a book. By 1905 Renoir had moved south to Cagnes-sur-Mer for the mild air, his hands increasingly crippled by rheumatoid arthritis. In the years to come he'd paint with the brush wedged between stiffened fingers. Coco was his constant model in this last chapter; Renoir made more than 90 studies and portraits of him. The boy grew up to be a ceramicist and later helped his brother Jean, the film director, on his early films.