扮成小丑的克劳德·雷诺阿

By 1909 Renoir was 68 and badly crippled by arthritis. His hands were so stiff that assistants had to wedge the brush between his fingers, yet he still painted almost every day at his house in the south of France. The boy here is his youngest son Claude, called Coco, then about eight. Renoir wanted a grand full-length portrait in the manner of the old Spanish masters he loved, so he put the child in a red clown's tunic against a marble column, as if for a court painting. Coco hated it. The white stockings itched, and the last sittings came down to bargaining: he finally agreed to keep them on in exchange for a box of oil paints and a toy train. The warm, soft reds are the colours Renoir came back to again and again in these final years, when he painted his own family more than anyone else.