Portrait of Coco

Claude Renoir — known within the family as 'Coco' — was born in August 1901 when his father was sixty and already severely limited by arthritis, yet the birth transformed Pierre-Auguste's late work by providing his most beloved and most-painted child subject. Portrait of Coco at the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) dates from 1903, when the boy was barely two, and shows Renoir's capacity for tender observation even under physical constraint. The MASP's collection, which includes one of Latin America's finest holdings of European Impressionism, acquired this work as part of the systematic collecting that established the museum as one of South America's great cultural institutions. Coco would grow up to become a ceramicist, following the family's artistic bent but in a different medium. His father's hundreds of images of him — from infant portraits through boyhood scenes of play and study — constitute one of the most sustained pictorial records of childhood in Western art, rivalling Renoir's portraits of his other sons in their evidence of parental devotion that found its fullest expression in acts of looking and painting.

The child's soft, rounded facial forms respond perfectly to Renoir's technique of building up flesh through layers of warm, fluid brushwork. He avoids any hardness of edge in rendering the face, keeping transitions between light and shadow soft to convey the particular quality of young skin — luminous, slightly translucent, and unworn by time.