El pez

By 1917 Renoir was in his mid-seventies and badly crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, living in the warmth of Cagnes-sur-Mer above the Mediterranean. His hands were so deformed that helpers wedged the brush between his fingers, and still he painted nearly every day. France was three years into the First World War, both his older sons wounded at the front, and the small domestic subjects he could arrange at home suited a body that could no longer roam. A few fish on a cloth is exactly that kind of subject, an arm's reach from his chair. In these last years his palette ran to warm reds and rose, the same glowing tones he had used for skin in his bathers. He kept at these close, handleable things until the end, two years off.