Gabrielle with Jewellery

By 1910 Renoir was 69 and could barely hold a brush. Rheumatoid arthritis had twisted his hands so badly that at his house near Cagnes-sur-Mer, in the south of France, assistants wedged the brush between his stiffened fingers each morning. None of that pain shows here. The warmth of the south soaks the canvas, and the woman looking out at us is Gabrielle Renard, who had come to the family in 1894 as nanny to his son Jean, the future film director, and stayed on for years as his favourite model. He paints her turned a little toward us, a few pieces of jewellery catching the light against her skin. The reds he built the whole picture from are the colour he leaned on hardest in these late years.