The Farm at Les Collettes, Cagnes

By the time Renoir painted this, his hands were badly crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, and he had moved south for the warmth. In 1907 he bought an old estate called Les Collettes at Cagnes, on the Mediterranean near Nice, partly to save its ancient olive trees from being cut down for a flower nursery. The farmhouse here, screened by those silvery olives, became one of his constant late motifs, though he actually lived in a new house he had built elsewhere on the grounds. The paint is loose and warm, the forms softened into light. He went on working outdoors here, a brush sometimes bound to his stiffened fingers, until his death in 1919.