The Chocolate Cup
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 to 1919) · About 1878
A young woman in a dark blue dress sits on a red sofa, stirring a cup of chocolate on a tray beside her, with a folded embroidered napkin on her lap. Behind her a vase of roses and white blossom fills the corner, and the wallpaper is a haze of pink and green. She glances toward us, not quite smiling, a small flower pinned at her breast. Everything in the room is soft: the flowers, the fabrics, her hair caught loosely at the back of her head. Renoir painted it in about 1878, at the height of his Impressionist years, when he was making a living from portraits of the Parisian middle class and its daughters.
Look at the paint. The flowers are not drawn but suggested with quick dabs of white, pink and green that resolve into roses only at a distance. The dark dress is the anchor of the picture, a solid mass of blue against all that flicker, and the cup and saucer are described in a few strokes of blue and white. Notice how Renoir handles the face with more care than anything else, blending the tones smoothly, because this is where a portrait earns its fee. The red of the sofa and the white napkin frame the figure like a stage, and the whole picture has the warmth of a well heated apartment on a winter afternoon.
The painting belongs to the museum's own collection and hangs in the chapter on the modern world, where the Impressionist moment is set beside contemporary developments in Japan and elsewhere. It is a good painting to end a visit with, a reminder that the museum's story of humanity includes the small pleasures of an ordinary afternoon. The identity of the sitter is not certain; she may have been a model rather than a client.
Did You Know? Renoir once said that a painting should be something pleasant and pretty, because there were enough unpleasant things in the world already.
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