阿黛尔·贝松肖像

Renoir painted this in 1918, the last full year of his life. He was 77 and living in the south of France at Cagnes, his hands so twisted by rheumatism that helpers had to wedge the brush between his fingers, and he worked in short sittings. None of that strain reaches the canvas. Adèle Besson was the wife of Georges Besson, a young writer and publisher who had begun championing Renoir's work, and the couple later left this portrait, with much else, to the museum in Besançon. He gives her warm skin and a loose cloud of hair, colour brushed wet over colour. Two of his sons had been wounded at the front, and the war would end that November, but inside the studio he was still painting flesh and light as though nothing else pressed on him.