Autoportrait

Renoir painted himself here in 1899, at 58, looking every inch the settled bourgeois, with a trimmed beard, a soft hat and patterned wallpaper behind him, the picture of a man who had finally made money after decades of struggle. What the calm surface does not show is that this was the year his hands began to fail him. The rheumatoid arthritis that would slowly cripple him had set in, and in the years to come he would paint with brushes wedged into stiffening fingers, wheeled up to the canvas. Perhaps that is why the eyes under the hat are so searching. This is a man studying his own face hard in a mirror. He never showed the painting to anyone. It stayed in his studio for the last 20 years of his life and only left after his death, which is how it reached a collector in Massachusetts.