Léonard Renoir, The Artist’s Father

The summer of 1869 was the one where Renoir and his friend Claude Monet set up their easels side by side at a riverside bathing spot outside Paris and worked out the flickering, broken brushwork that would soon be called Impressionism. This portrait comes from that same year, and it looks nothing like that. Renoir was 28 and broke, back living under his parents' roof, and he painted his father Léonard, a tailor then about 70, in sober blacks and greys that owe more to the older painter Manet than to any sunlit river. There is no colour experiment here, just an old craftsman looked at plainly by a son who happened to be home because he could not afford to be anywhere else. Léonard had brought the family to Paris from Limoges decades earlier, cutting cloth for a living.