Coco en chapeau de paille

Coco en chapeau de paille of 1904 at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia shows Renoir's youngest son Claude, then three years old, in the summer straw hat that became one of his defining visual accessories in his father's paintings. The straw hat was compositionally useful for Renoir — it created a warm golden frame around the child's face and introduced the specific texture of woven straw as a challenge for his late handling — but it was also simply the hat Coco wore in the garden at Cagnes in summer. The Chrysler Museum's collection of European and American art includes significant French Impressionist holdings acquired through the philanthropy of Walter P. Chrysler Jr., and this late Renoir child portrait is one of the museum's most intimate French works. The straw hat paintings of Coco form a sub-series within the broader body of child portraiture that Renoir produced in his final decade: the same child at different angles, in different seasons, the hat providing compositional continuity while the boy's features and expression changed as he grew from infancy toward early childhood.

The straw hat's woven texture and golden warmth create a luminous frame around the child's face, with Renoir handling the hat's material as carefully as the face itself. His technique builds the hat's colour through warm ochres and pale yellows that echo the child's blonde hair and warm skin tones, integrating the accessory into the overall chromatic warmth of the portrait.