Coco

Coco (1904), at the Flint Institute of Arts in Michigan, shows Claude Renoir — by now one of his father's most-painted subjects — at age three. Renoir painted his youngest son with a frequency that suggests genuine pictorial fascination: the round face, dark eyes, and soft child's forms presented endless variations on a beloved theme. The Flint Institute, located in a mid-sized Michigan city, holds this canvas as evidence of how widely Renoir's work was distributed through American collections in the early twentieth century.

The child portrait concentrates Renoir's warm flesh-tone technique on the specific qualities of a three-year-old's face: the roundness of still-undifferentiated features, the luminosity of young skin, the large proportion of forehead to jaw. His handling deliberately softens every edge to convey the physical softness of early childhood.