Lost Renoir painting of his son resurfaces after 100 years

A painting Pierre-Auguste Renoir made around 1910 just sold for $2 million at a Paris auction — and almost nobody knew it existed.

L'enfant et ses jouets (The Child and His Toys) shows Renoir's young son Jean sitting in the lap of his nanny, Gabrielle Renard, playing with toys against soft green wallpaper. It's intimate and unhurried, the kind of domestic scene most artists never bother to paint. But Renoir did, and then the painting vanished into private hands for a century.

When it came up for auction at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris on November 25, it had never been publicly exhibited or even published in art historical records. An international buyer secured it for $1.68 million, or about $2 million with fees — well within the expected range. The painting arrived at auction in pristine condition, requiring no restoration work.

How a masterpiece stayed hidden

Renoir gave the painting to Jeanne Baudot, a student and friend who became Jean's godmother. Baudot passed it to her son, Jean Griot, who hung it in his bedroom for decades. When Griot died in 2011, the painting's existence remained largely unknown outside his family circle.

This wasn't Renoir's only portrait of the pair. The Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris holds another study, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington has a third that Griot once owned. But this version — intimate, unpublished, unseen — felt like a genuine discovery when it finally emerged.

"In the painting, you can see that Jean is truly enjoying himself, and the painter is enjoying painting him," art historian Pascal Perrin told Artnet. "Renoir used light in a very special way."

Gabrielle Renard wasn't just a nanny. She was Jean's mother's cousin and a formative presence in his childhood. She took him to Guignol puppet shows in Montmartre — shadow theater performances that would shape how he saw the world. Decades later, Jean Renoir, who became one of cinema's greatest directors, credited her influence in his 1974 memoir: "She taught me to see the face behind the mask and the fraud behind the flourishes. She taught me to detest the cliché."

He went on to direct La Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939), films routinely cited among the greatest ever made. La Grande Illusion, about French prisoners of war escaping during World War I, became the first foreign-language film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.

When asked about posing for his father's portraits, Jean recalled the painter's method with warmth. "When I was very small, 3, 4 or 5 years old, he didn't choose the pose himself, but took advantage of some activity that seemed to keep me quiet." No stiff formality — just a father painting his son while he played, the way this rediscovered painting captures it.

Now, after a century in private hands, the work will likely find its way into a museum collection, where it can finally be seen alongside the other Renoir studies of Jean and Gabrielle.