블라우스를 풀어헤친 가브리엘

By 1907 Renoir was in his sixties, his hands crippled by arthritis, and he painted mostly the warm, close subjects around him. Chief among his models was Gabrielle Renard, a cousin of his wife who had come to the household as a nanny and stayed for years. Here she sits in soft green light, her blouse fallen open, rendered in the loose, glowing flesh tones of his last period. The picture's later life is stranger than its making. It belongs to the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, part of a remarkable hoard of modern Western art bought for Iran in the 1970s under the Shah, the country's ruler. After the 1979 revolution much of that collection went into storage, and this Renoir has stayed in the basement, kept from view because of the bared breast.