Retrato de Paul Haviland

The commission came in 1884 from two men in one family. Charles Haviland ran the porcelain works at Limoges that his family had founded to supply the American market, and his father-in-law Philippe Burty was a Paris critic, the man who had put the word japonisme into circulation a dozen years earlier. Between them they decided that only Renoir would do for a portrait of four-year-old Paul. Renoir at that moment was in difficulty with his own painting, back from Italy, distrusting the loose handling he had helped invent and pulling his figures into hard outlines again. The boy grew up between France and America, went to Harvard, took up photography and ended up in Alfred Stieglitz's circle in New York before his father called him home to the porcelain business. The portrait stayed in the family and was not shown in public until 1952, in Limoges.