Sunday

This is The Breakfast Tray by Elizabeth Okie Paxton (US), painted in about 1910.

Bigger but flatter and more blurry, with the colours slightly off:

Elizabeth Okie Paxton was married to William McGregor Paxton, who was one of the main figures of the Boston School. The Boston School artists painted decorous, prosperous scenes for decorous, prosperous people. The movement was influenced by artists like John Singer Sargent and Johannes Vermeer. The paintings were about clarity, beauty and restraint. They were extremely polite.

William McGregor-Paxton had taught Elizabeth when she was at art school before they got married. During their marriage, and indeed after his death, she managed his very successful career and slightly subsumed her own. He painted portraits (many of her) and interiors, so she deliberately stuck to pretty still lives.

But clearly she suddenly went rogue, because our painting here is not a still life. And while very pretty, it is neither polite nor restrained. It heaves like a bosom in a romantic novel. It is so intimate as to be provocative.

Here is a woman’s bed in abandoned disarray. All the elements of still life are there, but it’s like they’ve been thrown gleefully in the air. Something has happened in this bed, and very recently.

The contents of the silver tray say breakfast for one, but nothing else about the picture does. The woman’s shoes have been kicked off in a hurry and are lying carelessly on the floor. The sheets are so rumpled as to have come untucked. The satin dressing gown is about to slide off the bed. The pillows, one still bearing the imprint of a head, are all messed up (and touching each other). The light suggests it’s early morning. Even the grapefruit on the tray looks slightly indecent.

The colours are feminine, delicate colours, fleshy even - apart from the garment at the end of the bed. What is it? A pair of men’s trousers? A man’s dressing gown? And where is the man? And where is the woman? Are they in the bathroom? Who is the man?

Whatever the scenario, you get the sense that the woman has had a lovely night and is now ready to go about her day - I imagine she’s just out of sight, smiling to herself in the bath. To me - and I don’t think this is too wildly fanciful - our invisible woman embodies modernity, progress and new freedoms. What I especially love here is the confident luxuriousness of everything - this isn’t a portrait of a sordid encounter in a rented room. Nothing about the painting suggests regret, or the sense of a mistake having been made. It is a celebratory scene.

Thank you for stopping by. These monthly picture posts are free to read (this is a bonus one because I came across the painting yesterday and just loved it). They alternate with my food posts, which are also free. For everything else, you need a paid subscription, so do consider that if you’d like to. If you’d like a sampler of paywalled posts first, there’s one here, plus there are various free posts dotted about.

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