Renoir, Room 12: painting to the very end

A dealer’s gamble more than a museum’s obvious choice

Late Renoir — the work after 1900 — long had a poor reputation: brushwork judged soft, colours too russet, nudes seen as repetitive. It was precisely this period that Paul Guillaume, a young Parisian dealer, chose to collect insistently from the 1910s-1920s onward, alongside Cézanne and, above all, painters of his own generation. Of the 146 works in the Jean Walter and Paul Guillaume collection now at the Orangerie, around twenty are by Renoir, most of them late works.

The museum’s layout reflects this stance: the room devoted to Renoir (Room 12) opens directly onto the one hung with Picasso and Matisse (Room 11). This proximity is not a curatorial coincidence — it is the trace of a conviction Guillaume made public in his lifetime.

1. Room 12 — Cagnes-sur-Mer, painting with hands that were closing up

Renoir developed rheumatoid polyarthritis around 1892, when he was in his fifties. The disease progressed slowly but steadily: it was already described as severely disabling by around 1903, and continued to deform his hands — deviated fingers, locked joints — until his death in 1919. In 1907 he settled permanently at Les Collettes, a farming estate in Cagnes-sur-Mer, for the mildness of the climate.

The most widespread image — a paintbrush “strapped” to a paralysed hand — deserves clarification. According to a medical study published in the journal Hand devoted specifically to his case, Renoir retained the ability to close his hand around an object, but no longer had enough strength or precision to grip a fine brush unaided: it was placed in his hand instead, the hand having first been wrapped in a soft cloth to prevent friction from causing sores. This was, then, less a brush lashed to an inert stump than a routine gesture of assistance, made necessary by the progressive deformation of his fingers — an important nuance compared with the legend, but one that in no way diminishes how genuinely difficult the act of painting was in his last ten years.

2. Room 12 — the son as clown, the last bather

“Claude Renoir as a Clown” (1909) depicts the painter’s third son, Claude, nicknamed Coco, as a child — the same Claude who would later become a ceramicist. For this sitting, Renoir had his son dressed in a red, puffy clown costume; when the child refused to wear the planned woollen stockings, silk ones were bought instead. The painting carries inventory number RF 1960-17 at the Orangerie.

The room also displays the obsessive subject of this last decade: the bather, the female nude, often painted in the very final years from a single model — Andrée Heuschling, known as Dédée, sent to Renoir by Matisse himself in 1917 because he found her “typically Renoir.” She modelled until the painter’s death in 1919 and inspired, among others, “Blonde with a Rose” (1915-1917). Renoir is said to have remarked of her: “How beautiful she is! I have worn out my old eyes on her young skin and have seen that I was not a master, but a child.” Having become an actress under the name Catherine Hessling, she married another of the painter’s sons in 1920, Jean Renoir, the future filmmaker — not the child in the clown painting, but his brother. It was Claude, precisely, who inherited “Blonde with a Rose” on his father’s death and sold it to Paul Guillaume in 1929: the canvas thus passed directly from the family to the dealer, before entering the national collections in 1963.

3. Room 11 — the link Paul Guillaume claimed

The pairing of Renoir with the avant-garde is not a retrospective reading: Paul Guillaume staged it in his own lifetime. In 1918 he organised an exhibition in his own gallery bringing Matisse and Picasso face to face, an event that remains in art history as one of the first museum-style dialogues between the two painters. More broadly, the Musée de l’Orangerie presents the 1920s works of Derain, Picasso and Matisse as entering into dialogue with the late period, then being rediscovered, of Cézanne, Monet and Renoir — this is exactly the logic behind the proximity of Rooms 11 and 12 today.

“Woman with a Tambourine” (1925) and “Woman with a White Hat” (c. 1921, acquired by Guillaume in 1929) are two Picassos from the period following his neo-classical phase of the early 1920s; the first, a languid odalisque holding a tambourine, owes its theme to the odalisques Matisse was painting at the time, while remaining clearly distinct from them in its treatment of volume. “Woman with a Violin” (1921-1923) and “Women on a Sofa, or The Divan” (1921) are two Matisses painted in Nice, in interiors where a Moorish screen and a sea view recur as motifs of this so-called “Nice period.” Nothing in these four canvases refers to Renoir directly; the link Guillaume drew was one of generation and temperament — the persistence of the nude and the female figure as subject, against the grain of the more abstract avant-gardes of the previous decade.

How long it takes

The two rooms are visited one after the other, on level -2, and lend themselves to a continuous reading of the “last generation” brought together by Paul Guillaume.

Room 12 — Renoir — 15 minutes.
Room 11 — Picasso and Matisse — 10 minutes.
Both rooms with a reading of the labels — 30 minutes.

Sources and verification

This article draws on the following sources:

Displays and room openings can change. Check the Musée de l’Orangerie website on the day of your visit before following a route.

Listen to the commentary in the gallery

This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.