Portrait of Joseph Le Cœur

Renoir painted this solemn boy around 1871, just after the Franco-Prussian War, in which France was beaten and lost the region of Alsace to the new German Empire. The child is Joseph Le Cœur, from a family of architects who were among Renoir's earliest friends and patrons, the people who gave the young painter work and a place to stay when he had almost no money. The portrait's later life answers the war it was born in. In 1949 a collector named Florine Langweil, a committed French patriot, gave it to this museum in Colmar, in the heart of Alsace, as part of a gift meant to strengthen French art in a region that Germany and France had fought over for generations.