Astonishing Film of Arthritic Impressionist Painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1915)

You may nev­er look at a paint­ing by Pierre-August Renoir in quite the same way again after see­ing this three-minute film. It did­n’t show in his art­work, but Renoir suf­fered from severe rheuma­toid arthri­tis dur­ing the last three decades of his life. He worked in con­stant pain, right up until the day he died.

In this rare footage from 1915 we see the 74-year-old mas­ter seat­ed at his easel, apply­ing paint to a can­vas while his youngest son Claude, 14, stands by to arrange the palette and place the brush in his father’s per­ma­nent­ly clenched hand. By the time the film was made Renoir could no longer walk, even with crutch­es. He depend­ed on oth­ers to move him around in a wheel­chair. His assis­tants would scroll large can­vas­es across a cus­tom-made easel, so that the seat­ed painter could reach dif­fer­ent areas with his lim­it­ed arm move­ments.

But there were times when the pain was so bad he was essen­tial­ly par­a­lyzed. In the book Renoir, My Father, the painter’s famous film­mak­er son Jean describes the shock his father’s wast­ed fig­ure and gnarled hands gave to peo­ple who knew him only from his beau­ti­ful art:

His hands were ter­ri­bly deformed. His rheuma­tism had made the joints stiff and caused the thumbs to turn inward towards the palms, and his fin­gers to bend towards the wrists. Vis­i­tors who were unpre­pared for this could not take their eyes off his defor­mi­ty. Though they did not dare to men­tion it, their reac­tion would be expressed by some such phrase as “It isn’t pos­si­ble! With hands like that, how can he paint those pic­tures? There’s some mys­tery some­where.”

The film of Renoir was made by 30-year-old Sacha Gui­t­ry, who appears mid­way through the film sit­ting down and talk­ing with the artist. Gui­t­ry was the son of the famous actor and the­atre direc­tor Lucien Gui­t­ry, and would go on to even greater fame than his father as an actor, film­mak­er and play­wright. When a group of Ger­man intel­lec­tu­als issued a man­i­festo after the out­break of World War I brag­ging about the supe­ri­or­i­ty of Ger­man cul­ture, Gui­t­ry was infu­ri­at­ed. As an act of patri­o­tism he decid­ed to make a film of France’s great men and women of the arts. It would be released as Ceux de Chez Nous, or “Those of Our Land.” Gui­t­ry and Renoir were already friends, so when the young man embarked on his project he trav­elled to Renoir’s home at Cagnes-sur-Mer, in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region. The date was short­ly after June 15, 1915, when Renoir’s wife Aline died. In Sacha Gui­t­ry: The Last Boule­vardier, writer James Hard­ing describes the scene:

The choice of time was unfor­tu­nate. That very day Renoir’s wife was to be buried. Sacha went to the old man who sat hud­dled arthrit­i­cal­ly in his wheel chair and mur­mured: ‘It must be ter­ri­bly painful, Mon­sieur Renoir, and you have my deep­est sym­pa­thy.’ ‘Painful?’ he replied, shift­ing his racked limbs, ‘you bet my foot is painful!’ They pushed him in his chair up to a can­vas, and, while Sacha leaned watch­ing over his shoul­der, Renoir jabbed at the pic­ture with brush­es attached to hands which had cap­tured so much beau­ty but which now were shriv­elled like birds’ claws. The flat­ter­ing reminder that he was being filmed for pos­ter­i­ty had no effect on the man who, on being award­ed the cra­vat of a Com­man­deur of the Légion d’Hon­neur, had said: ‘How can you expect me to wear a cra­vat when I nev­er wear a col­lar?’

Renoir died four years after the film was made, on Decem­ber 3, 1919. He lived long enough to see some of his paint­ings installed in the Lou­vre. When a young Hen­ri Matisse asked the suf­fer­ing old man why he kept paint­ing, Renoir is said to have replied, “The pain pass­es, but the beau­ty remains.”