薔薇を持つガブリエル

By 1911 Renoir was 70 and badly crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, his hands so deformed that brushes had to be wedged between his fingers. He kept painting, and one of the people who kept him going was Gabrielle Renard, a cousin of his wife who had joined the household as a teenager to help raise his son Jean and stayed on as his favourite model. Here she sits bare-shouldered with a red rose tucked into her dark hair, painted in the warm, melting reds and golds of his last years. Over his life he portrayed her more than 200 times, and this is one of the final ones, made only a few years before she left his service.