Portrait of Jean

The boy with the long reddish hair and the white bow is Jean Renoir, the painter's second son, about five years old here in 1899. He would grow up to become one of the great film directors, the man behind "La Grande Illusion" and "The Rules of the Game," and decades later he wrote a warm memoir of the father who painted him. Renoir kept his sons' hair long well past the usual age, partly because he loved the way the curls caught the light and the colour, and this portrait is really an excuse to paint that hair. By 1899 his own hands were beginning to stiffen with the arthritis that would eventually cripple them, though none of that strain shows in the soft, easy handling here. In 1900 he gave the picture to Limoges, the city where he had been born in 1841.