Portrait of Coco

Portrait of Coco (1903), at the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), depicts Renoir's youngest son Claude, known as Coco, who was born in 1901 and became one of his father's most frequent subjects in the early 1900s. Renoir adored his children and painted them with an unsentimental but genuine warmth, treating the child's face with the same attentive observation he brought to adult portraits while capturing the specific physical characteristics of early childhood. Coco's large dark eyes and soft child's features were ideally suited to Renoir's warm, rounded painting style.

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.