“I think I’m beginning to know something about painting,” Pierre-Auguste Renoir said on the day he died as he turned away from a still life he’d been working on and handed his brushes to his assistant. Although wracked by the ravages of rheumatoid arthritis, Renoir painted prolifically to the end of his life in 1919. Late Renoir, an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, examines the last three decades of Renoir’s oeuvre and demonstrates just how much the master had learned near life’s close. In those final years, surrounded by his growing family, Renoir bloomed into a deeper, more thoughtful, more joyous artist who reveled in the beauty of painting and escaped the pain of age into the joy of ageless art. “The pain subsides,” Renoir responded to questions concerning his painting with arthritis, “but the beauty remains.” Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Late Bloomer."
[Image: The Vineyards at Cagnes, 1908. Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841 – 1919). Oil on canvas, 18 1/4 x 21 3/4 inches. Framed: 27 3/8 x 31 1/4 x 4 1/4 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Colonel and Mrs. E. W. Garbisch.]
[Many thanks to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for providing me with press materials and the catalogue for Late Renoir.]
