Pines at Cagnes

Renoir painted this in 1919, the last year of his life. He was 78, his hands so twisted by rheumatism that a brush had to be wedged between his crippled fingers, and he had settled at Cagnes in the south of France for the warmth. A car and driver let him get out beyond his own garden to motifs like these two pines, which he set down with very dry paint, so thin in places that the weave of the canvas shows through. After a lifetime of chasing the craft he seems here to have stopped chasing, the trees planted with an old man's ease. He died that December.