Episode Details

Pierre-Auguste Renoir spent his final decades painting with brushes strapped to hands so crippled by rheumatoid arthritis that he could barely hold them. While the art world raced toward abstraction, Cubism, and conceptual art, Renoir stubbornly kept painting luminous nudes and sun-dappled gardens — insisting that beauty was not a weakness but a radical act. He remains one of the most popular and most critically underestimated painters in history.

This episode traces Renoir from his working-class Parisian childhood through the Impressionist exhibitions, the "sour period" crisis that nearly ended his career, and the arthritic final decades that produced some of his most sensuous work.

• Renoir's porcelain-painting apprenticeship and his entry into the Impressionist circle
• The luminous Impressionist masterpieces and the critical hostility they provoked
• The "sour period" crisis of confidence and the classical turn that divided his admirers
• The crippling arthritis, the brushes strapped to his hands, and the defiant late nudes