The Chinese Figurine in the American interioR

The American artist William M. Paxton (1869-1941), considered old-fashioned by some modernists, was a prominent genre and portrait painter in the Beaux-Arts style.

The Figurine, 1921, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Henry Ward Ranger through the National Academy of Design, 1951.10.8

The Figurine illustrates the vogue for Asian decorative wares that informed American collecting tastes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here, a Chinese blue-and-white jar is shown alongside a Chinese figurine; a maid delicately cleans the glass encasing the figurine. Paxton’s compositions often portray women in beautiful interiors. The light source from the left highlighting the woman’s rosy complexion, combined with the sensitive attention to detail, recalls the works of the seventeenth-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer.