La Saône se jetant dans les bras du Rhône Le fleuve Scamandre The present pastel work on paper by Renoir is to be counted among the world's largest pastels made by the master and is to be viewed as a heroic achievement because of its size and complexity. This comes from the fact that, in the last years of his life, Renoir was confined to a wheelchair and his hands were stunted, like much of his body, by a deforming arthritis, which caused him excruciating pain and forced him to work with paints or brushes tied to his hands. The work was commissioned from him by the City of Lyon and was intended to serve as an outline for the creation of a tapestry, which would never be made, probably due to the outbreak of World War I. Renoir had as his subject an allegory with the theme of the two rivers that meet in the city of Lyon, the Saone and the Rhone, and for this work he used an idea he had already worked on a few years earlier, with some small-format drawings and especially a famous engraving which he entitled "Les Fleuve Scamandre". The idea is to celebrate the meeting of the two rivers by transfiguring them into a young and precocious woman, as the Saone, and an old, bearded man, representing the Rhone, who welcomes the young woman into his arms. Made with the gentle, crepuscular tones typical of Renoir's work in his later years, it partly fits within an exploration tending almost to a lack of form which also fascinated his friend Monet, in his last works devoted to water lilies. Both arrived at the same conclusion, that of the unraveling of the stroke, which was able to generate a new vision of painting, built more on suggestions than on realism, and which, in Renoir, reaches great poetic heights, though often overlooked and underestimated. Concerning this work, his son Claude Renoir had this to say in an interview: I was a few years of practice short of being useful to him and helping him in this work, so I had to sit helpless and watch the efforts he made, all by himself, to make this cartoon for the tapestry that was requested of him by the city of Lyon.