William McGregor Paxton - Tea Leaves [1909]

In a windowless parlour permeated by soft light and a dreamy atmosphere, two elegant women pass the time by doing very little or nothing at all. Paxton (American, 1869–1941) hints at a narrative, but he asks that the viewer invent it, recapitulating the ambiguity of Vermeer's paintings, which he admired. Paxton often depicted refined women, such as his patrons' wives and daughters, at leisure in handsome Boston interiors of the sort that they, as keepers of culture, would have decorated and occupied. By equating women with the precious aesthetic objects that surround them, Paxton echoes the spirit of the novelist Henry James, who portrayed women as collectible objects in The American (1877) and Portrait of a Lady (1881). Paxton's works also accord with pronouncements by the sociologist Thorstein Veblen, who observed in his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) that a woman's "conspicuous leisure" signalled the wealth of her father or her husband.

[Oil on canvas, 91.6 x 71.9 cm]