Seated in his wheelchair, his brush bound to his hand between two fingers, the painter worked intently on his canvas, his grey-green eyes squinting at the luxuriant landscape. "Merde," he murmured, "but it's beautiful!" He was Auguste Renoir, already in his late 70s and crippled by rheumatism, but lively in his opinions (shown a Picasso painting, he shouted: "Take that filth away!") and unabashedly glorying in his work. Showing a nude he had just completed, he confessed that his model was the baker's wife, exclaimed: "She had a bottom—oh, forgive me. But it's...
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