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Pierre Auguste Renoir Rheumatoid Arthritis

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Pierre-Auguste Renoir was one of the major painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and he suffered from Rheumatoid Arthritis for much of his adult life. He first developed symptoms of the disease around the age of 50, and continued to paint in spite of developing the characteristic signs and impairment of Rheumatoid. Surprisingly, his paintings appeared not to lose their quality, even in the last 20 years of his life, when he was crippled by the disease. According to Kowalski and Chung, he applied a wide variety of coping mechanisms and used his ingenuity to come up with different ways to continue painting even as his infirmities became more disabling.

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