Auguste Renoir painted his friend and patron Eugène Murer — the pastry chef and writer born Hyacinthe-Eugène Meunier — in 1877, a year in which Murer was actively assembling one of the earliest and most significant private collections of Impressionist painting. The loose, broken brushwork and warm, informal palette typical of Renoir's mid-1870s portraiture register the sitter with evident familiarity rather than formal distance. Oil on canvas, the picture is a document of the patronage networks that sustained Impressionism before the movement gained institutional acceptance. It entered the collection through the Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg bequest in 2002. Scion sees portraits like this one — tied to a specific, historically important collector — as carrying a layer of documented significance beyond the artist's hand alone.