Woman's 1910 Suggestion of Seduction
A new prized acquisition for the National Gallery of Art is among its sexiest paintings
A painting featuring a bed is a new star on the art scene of Washington, D.C.
An unmade bed.
An unmade bed, with an abandoned breakfast tray, a newspaper left on the floor, a pair of pumps that were similarly tossed there without care.
Now I’m one of those people who usually dislikes the sight of an unmade bed. You get up, you make the bed—always and immediately. I’m also no fan of the idea of breakfast in bed. And I want dishes taken away from the table as soon as any meal is done. A newspaper on the floor? Not good.
Yet I love the painting seen below and I’m far from alone in doing so. If you have a chance to visit the National Gallery in Washington, stand for a few minutes and watch how people, particularly women, react to “The Breakfast Tray” by Elizabeth Okie Paxton (*1878-1972).
This is one of the sexiest works in the vast collection of the National Gallery of Art, even without any flesh shown.
The images of “The Breakfast Tray” call to mind a pleasant evening and at least part of a morning spent with a partner.
The painting conveys “the feeling of being in that languorous bed,” wrote Rena Tobey in 2014 in the Art Times, a journal focused on the U.S. Northeast corridor. (There’s a link at the end of this essay to this article and other material used in my research.)
“The painting invites us into a world—feminine, messy, sensual, and believable. It is full of personality. Rather than convey a sense of easy domestic harmony, this bedroom can evoke wonder, anxiety, curiosity, titillation, and a variety of narratives that rarely resolve,” Tobey wrote in her article.
You’re free to make up your own story about this painting, as we all are about works of art that interest us.
This painting might conjure an image of the early passionate days of a romance, or a rendezvous, the morning-after scene of a notable encounter.
Yet this painting, dated to 1910, is the work of an artist, Elizabeth Okie Paxton, who married her painter husband, William McGregor Paxton, in 1899.
So you can read this, if you’d like, as a painting about enduring romance between people who have been together at least a decade.
The couple remained married until the death of William McGregor Paxton in 1941. As a widow, Elizabeth Okie Paxton spent much of the rest of her life trying to preserve her husband’s artistic legacy, perhaps to the detriment of her own.
Think for a minute how bold Patton’s “The Breakfast Tray” was for its time.
Elizabeth Okie Paxton and William McGregor Paxton were both part of what’s called the Boston School, a group of painters often had a connection to that city’s Museum of Fine Arts, either directly through employment or through the artists with whom they trained. Some of the most successful artists of the Boston School did their early studies at the Académie Julian in Paris, including William Paxton and Edmund Tarbell (1862-1938).
The male artists of the Boston School “enjoyed great success by marketing images of women engaged in activities traditionally defined as feminine—such as sewing, knitting, and reading—or posed in elegant interior spaces, unengaged in any activity,” the National Gallery of Art said in a March 2024 release.
But the female artists of the Boston School were sending different messages about the role of women. Consider the three painting below, all owned by the National Gallery of Art (NGA).
On the left, we have Edmund Tarbell’s painting “Josephine and Mercie,” done around 1908, showing his two daughters, one reading, one working at a desk. There’s a quiet tranquil vibe. In the center, we have “The Writer” by Mary Bradish Titcomb, dated to 1912, and then Paxton’s “The Breakfast Tray.”
In my mind, a more appropriate title for Titcomb’s painting would be “The Rewriter,” in a nod to novelist Mario Vargas Llosa.
Vargas Llosa speaks often of the necessary process of working an initial draft into something better. For example, a 2010 Princeton University news story quotes him saying: “What I like most is rewriting. To correct, to suppress, to add, to rebuild the story -- this process is the most exciting for me.”
Doesn’t it look like the woman in Titcomb’s painting is revising? That’s she may be going back over her initial draft, making changes?
I see this painting as showing a woman with the time and leisure to spread out her first draft in that table and get to work on it. She has claimed a beautiful space for her task.
Perhaps Tarbell’s daughter is doing the same, editing or revising, but to me, it looks like she is working on a letter or a journal entry. True, she’s doing so at a beautiful desk, but it’s a space she’s using, not one that she’s commanding for herself as does the woman in Titcomb’s painting.
The female artists of the Boston School competed with their male counterparts in a market where tranquil domestic scenes sold well. But they worked into their paintings signs of independence, the National Gallery of Art noted in a 2024 press release about its recent purchases of Paxton’s “The Breakfast Tray” and Titcomb’s “The Writer.”
Titcomb exhibited “The Writer” many times, but didn’t sell it. The work may have been “a reminder of her own struggle to live an independent life as a professional artist,” the NGA said in its 2024 press release.
In Paxton’s case, she made a radical departure from “picturesque landscapes and images of genteel women in interiors” that were common of the Boston School, the NGA press release said.
Instead “The Breakfast Tray” shows “cascading sheets, tossed pillows, a pair of women’s shoes strewn on the floor, and an elaborate breakfast still life on a chair next to the bed,” the NGA press release said. “The work was exceptionally modern and provocative for its time.”
For a look at a fascinating painting done by Elizabeth Okie Paxton’s husband, read my Medium essay Bitter Trade Wars, Quiet Domestic Scene .
Here are links for: the 2014 article by Rena Tobey from the Art Times |the 2010 Princeton University news article, “Novelist Vargas Llosa imparts writing insights to students,” by Jennifer Greenstein Altmann | press release National Gallery of Art Acquires Two Paintings by Women of the Boston School |NGA webpages for the paintings shown here, all of which are in the public domain: “The Breakfast Tray,” “The Writer” and “Josephine and Mercie.”
I marked the years for the life of Elizabeth Okie Paxton with an asterik (*) because different sources give different dates. I’m sticking with the ones posted by the NGA.
Thanks to the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School for its helpful and informative work.