Tilla Durieux

She sat for this in Paris in July 1914, a matter of weeks before Europe went to war. Tilla Durieux was a celebrated Berlin stage actress, and she came in the shimmering Poiret gown she had worn on stage the year before as Eliza Doolittle in Shaw's Pygmalion. Renoir was 73 and so crippled by arthritis that he could no longer grip a brush, so his was strapped to his hand. None of that strain shows. He builds her into a calm, broad pyramid of a figure, all warm rose and gold. Within weeks the borders closed, and the actress who had just posed in Paris was suddenly on the wrong side of a front line.