A painter, writer, and collector active in the modernista movement in Spain, Santiago Rusiñol from 1889 divided his time between Paris and Barcelona, where he was a founder of the avant-garde art group El Quatre Gats, and a friend and confidant of the young Pablo Picasso. In 1892 Rusiñol exhibited this picture in Paris as The Aquarium, the name referring to a Barcelona café whose walls were painted a vivid aquamarine. The dark realism of the image and the isolation of the principal figure, most likely a prostitute far gone in drink, recall the Parisian café scenes of Edgar Degas, while the high-keyed coloration and poetic stylization of forms anticipate Picasso's own works of his so-called Blue Period a decade later. The painting was bought in Paris in 1892 on behalf of the great Philadelphia collector John G. Johnson. Best known for his early Italian and seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, Johnson was also an important patron of the art of his own time, including the latest currents emerging in Europe. Christopher Riopelle, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 205.