Xícara de Chocolate

In February 1912 a Philadelphia doctor named Albert Barnes, who had made a fortune from an antiseptic, gave his old schoolfriend the painter William Glackens 20,000 dollars and sent him to Paris to buy modern French pictures. Glackens came back with 33 of them, and the first crate was opened in Philadelphia that April. Renoir was 71 that year, living at Cagnes on the Mediterranean coast, his hands deformed by two decades of rheumatoid arthritis, and still painting warm domestic scenes like this woman with her cup. Barnes bought him harder than he bought anyone else, and ended up with 181 Renoirs. This canvas is one of them.