Portrait of Claude Renoir

Portrait of Claude Renoir at the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, painted in 1902, shows the artist's youngest son as an infant of approximately one year — the product of Renoir's third and most unexpected late-life paternity. Claude's birth in 1901, when Renoir was sixty, came during the period of his most acute physical decline, yet the advent of the child galvanized his painting practice rather than diminishing it: the infant Coco became his most obsessively painted subject over the following years, the round face and luminous eyes of an infant providing the ultimate exercise in his lifelong pursuit of soft forms and warm skin in natural light. The Kawamura collection's holding of this early Coco portrait alongside their other late Renoir works documents the intense Japanese interest in his late period that developed particularly around the turn of the century. The soft, porcelain quality of infant skin and the rounded, undifferentiated forms of early childhood were perfectly suited to Renoir's late painting manner, and his images of the young Claude are among the most technically precise and personally warm of all his child portraits.

Paint is applied in soft, blending strokes with little hard edge, giving the infant's face an almost porcelain smoothness. Warm ochres and pinks dominate. The background is loosely handled, directing full attention to the child's face and expression.