William McGregor Paxton (American painter) 1869 - 1941
The Breakfast, 1911
oil on canvas
71.8 x 89.5 cm.
s.l.
Paxton's scene suggests his sense of humour and demonstrates his abiding adherence to academic compositions and techniques. The canvas shows a beautifully attired young woman sulking while her husband reads the newspaper, signifying his engagement with the outside world. She is excluded from that world not only by the inaccessibility of the morning news but also physically, by the multilayered window treatments that incorporate visually confining venetian blinds. Recording what one critic called the "newspaper-at-breakfast stage" of marriage, The Breakfast proposes that the domestic sphere was a cosy trap for some women. This disgruntled young wife is the "bird in a gilded cage" that Arthur J. Lamb celebrated in his popular song of 1900.
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