#domestic

The woman reading is Madame Hessel — according to what I've read, she was his art dealer's wife and one of his closest friends, and he painted her over and over for something like forty years. This is her on holiday at a house by the Normandy coast.

The blue in her jacket is ultramarine — ground lapis lazuli that reportedly cost more than gold at the time. Not the obvious choice for a plain house dress, if that's what this even is.

Apparently this was the first of his paintings to ever reach America — some collector picked it up in Paris for about $800, back when almost nobody had heard of him.

The odd name comes from the Cowper family, who used to own it — nothing to do with the subject. Like a lot of British collections, it eventually made its way into an American museum in the early 1900s.

Apparently he painted a whole string of these — a woman, a window, light coming through — enough of them that people talk about it as a series. It's named after the china rather than the person, which tells you something about where he was looking.

This is a home scene rather than a commission, as far as I can tell — a painter putting her own household on canvas. Beyond that I came up short. I couldn't find who the two students were or what the lesson was supposed to be. If anyone knows the rest of it, I'd love the story.

They say she's technically a kitchen maid, not a dairy worker — the milk here is just breakfast, not her job. It's been called one of the finest paintings of everyday life there is, though I'm never sure who gets to decide that.

Apparently she only made something like 200 paintings in her whole life, all around this size, all this hushed and toned-down. This exact table with the teapot turns up in three other versions elsewhere, so she must have kept coming back to it.

Apparently this is from before Boccioni signed onto Futurism in 1910 — a movement that made a point of rejecting quiet domestic scenes just like this one.