Woman Tying Her Shoe

When Renoir painted this around 1918, the last summer of the First World War was passing far to the north, and he was near the end of his own life at Les Collettes, his house among the olive trees above Cagnes on the Mediterranean coast. Rheumatoid arthritis had twisted his hands so badly that a brush had to be wedged between his fingers, and still he kept to warm, unhurried subjects like this: a woman bending to fasten her shoe, painted in the red and gold he had come to love in the southern light. By this point he had long left Paris and Impressionism behind, reaching instead for the fuller, simpler bodies of the old masters he admired. He died the following December, in 1919. Samuel Courtauld bought the painting three years later, one of the first Impressionist works he brought to London.