#interior

Apparently that's his own family and friends in their own sitting room. Painting your relatives is cheaper than hiring models — though from the faces, the sitting went on a while.

Stettheimer's better known for her chaotic party scenes and portraits of New York's art crowd. This is a rare quiet one — just a bowl of zinnias against a curtain.

This was one of the first of his rehearsal-room pictures, painted when he'd started getting himself in behind the scenes at the Paris opera house through friends with subscriptions. The building he was working in burned down a few years later, from what I can find, so the room itself is long gone.

The woman in the chair was a pianist who ran with a crowd of painters, writers and musicians. Apparently he painted her many times and the two stayed close friends for years, even after her marriage ended.

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.

He trained as a pharmacist and only turned to painting after an illness, or so the story goes, and then spent decades on small comic scenes of shabby, striving men. He made more than one version of this one. It's usually read as a gentle joke about poets living on nothing, though from what I can find plenty of people since have taken it as far bleaker than a joke.

He kept African and Pacific carvings around his studio and painted them into scenes like this one — the bowl in the title is one of them.

Man, woman, glass of wine in a tidy room — this was a whole genre in the Netherlands, and buyers at the time apparently read it straight off as a warning about where the drinking was heading. There's said to be a figure in the stained glass holding a set of reins, which stood for holding yourself back.

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.

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.

Nobody has ever settled what's happening in here. It's carried two titles almost from the start, one of them far uglier than the other, and people have spent a century hunting for the novel it's supposed to illustrate without ever agreeing on which one.

He trained in Paris alongside the modern crowd, and apparently the woman he later married went on to run one of the big New York galleries that sold this whole generation of American painters. This one came out of time spent in Spain.

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.

The men at the table were, supposedly, farm workers from his family's estate. He painted this same card game more than once, with fewer players crowded round it each time.

Apparently he started out drawing news scenes for papers — sent to sketch things on the spot before photographs could do the job — and supposedly that fast, get-it-down habit never left him, even once he'd moved on to painting people like this.

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.

From what I can find this was the only easel painting he ever managed to finish — he gave up on painting not long after and put everything into wallpaper, fabric and furniture instead. The woman modelling for it was Jane Burden, who he married the year after. There's a story that he wrote on the back that he couldn't paint her but he loved her; no idea whether that's true or just a good line people repeat.

I couldn't find much background on this one, no anecdote to pass along — if anyone knows the story behind that lit candle, I'd love to hear 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.

He'd gone over to visit his mother's family in New Orleans, who were in the cotton trade, and painted them at work — the men in here are supposedly relatives and their business partners. The plan, they say, was to sell it to a mill owner in England. That fell through, and it ended up being the first of his paintings a museum ever bought.