Cup of Chocolate (Femme prenant du chocolat)

Cup of Chocolate of 1912 connects Renoir's late domestic figure subjects to a deep tradition of kitchen and domestic genre painting running from Chardin's quiet eighteenth-century interiors through the bourgeois genre scenes of his own Impressionist contemporaries. Chocolate as a warm beverage carried particular social associations in French bourgeois culture — more intimate than the public sociability of café coffee, more personal than the ceremonial formality of tea — making it a subject of domestic contentment suited to his late aesthetic. Renoir had explored similar domestic subjects across his career, from the café-concert scenes of the 1870s to the intimate figure studies of the 1880s, but the late Cagnes versions strip away social observation to focus purely on warm sensory pleasure: the warmth of the cup, the warmth of the figure's hands around it, the warmth of the room. Albert Barnes, who acquired numerous such late Renoir domestic subjects, understood them as expressing a consistent philosophy of pleasure and warmth that he saw as fundamental to Renoir's contribution to modern painting.

The cup provides a focal point that directs the composition's colour around a specific warm, steam-implied object. Renoir models the woman's face and the cup with his characteristic close attention to warm, rounded form, while the surrounding domestic setting is painted with looser, more atmospheric strokes.