Jeune Femme au miroir

Renoir painted this warm, rosy young woman around 1915, and almost nothing around him was warm. He was in his 70s and so crippled by arthritis that his brushes had to be wedged between his swollen fingers. France was at war, both his sons were serving and had been wounded at the front, and his wife Aline died that same year. Still he wanted only youth and softness on the canvas, a girl in a flowered hat turning a hand mirror. One of the young models of these last years, Andree Heuschling, would go on to marry his son Jean and act in his early silent films under the name Catherine Hessling.