Ritratto di Marie Le Cœur

The Le Coeur family kept Renoir going through the 1860s. Jules Le Coeur, a painter, brought him into the household, and Jules's brother Charles, an architect, steered building clients his way. Renoir painted their relatives over and over, and this small head of Marie Le Coeur, 41 by 33 centimetres, is one of those, made around 1870. In July of that year France declared war on Prussia. Renoir was conscripted into a cavalry regiment, sent to the southwest to break horses, and came out of the war with dysentery rather than a wound, never having reached the fighting. The picture now hangs in Strasbourg, a city the same war took out of France until 1918.