August Auguste

In 1959 the formidable interviewer John Freeman took the Face to Face crew to the 81-year-old Augustus John’s studio. The beetling brow, piercing eye and a succession of roll-ups stuck to his lower lip offer almost a caricature of the undimmed rascality of the old devil. Like all the films in that remarkable series, it offers a glimpse into a world that we thought television was invented too late to record. But how much more extraordinary it is to watch, in a three-minute film made in 1915, another elderly artist — the 74-year-old Pierre-Auguste Renoir, crippled with arthritis, working at his easel. The externals are similar — the beard, the arty getup, the cigarette — but even in this silent film Renoir’s chatty urbanity speaks volumes about a man built in a very different vein.

Renoir was the only one of the great Impressionist painters to come from truly humble origins — his father was a tailor and his mother a seamstress — and he entered art school after an apprenticeship painting figures and flowers on porcelain and decorative schemes on window blinds.