Paul Durand-Ruel

By 1910 Paul Durand-Ruel was almost 80, and Renoir had known him for more than 30 years. He was the dealer who had gambled his business on the Impressionists when their canvases would not sell, buying by the hundred, sometimes to the edge of ruin, and it was he who finally opened the American market and made their reputations pay. Monet said plainly that without him they would have starved. Renoir shows him late in life as a quiet, watchful man in a dark coat, seated, hands still, with none of the swagger of a great salesman. The loose, warm handling is the Renoir of these final years, when rheumatoid arthritis had badly crippled his hands and he worked slowly and close to the canvas.