Self-Portrait

Renoir painted himself around 1875, at a moment when his pictures were barely selling and money was genuinely tight. He looks the part, hair and beard unkempt, though he has pulled on a clean striped shirt and a dark tie for the occasion. Look closely at the paint and you can see him testing things out, thin and almost bare in places, thickly loaded in others, as the Impressionists were working out how to catch light with broken touches of colour. He showed the little canvas at their second group exhibition in 1876. The collector Georges de Bellio, a Romanian doctor who quietly kept several of these painters afloat by buying their work, took to it so strongly that Renoir said he had gone crazy for it.