Portrait of the Artist’s Son Pierre

A restoration in 1978 showed that not every brushstroke on this small canvas is Renoir's. Restorers found paint from a later moment in the lower part of the picture, on the baby's hand, on the top of the bonnet and the dark edges of the bib, and even on the eyelids and the mouth. The likeliest explanation is that another painter went back over it, perhaps more than once, at a date nobody has pinned down. The handling underneath, free and luminous, with milky, opalescent colour, matches what Renoir was doing around 1885, the year this child was born. The baby in the bonnet is Pierre, his first son. He grew up to become an actor, and in 1932 he was the first to play Inspector Maigret on screen, in Night at the Crossroads, directed by his younger brother Jean.