Girl Sweeping

After training in Boston, Baltimore-born William McGregor Paxton studied in Paris at the Académie Julian and with the acclaimed painter Jean-Léon Gérôme at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in the late 1880s and early 1890s. His residency coincided with a renewed enthusiasm for the work of Dutch painter Jan Vermeer, whose newly popularized paintings were increasingly prized by European and American museums, scholars, and collectors. After returning to Boston, Paxton developed his signature subject matter of solitary women engaged in meditative interior activities. "Girl Sweeping," however, is rare among Paxton's works, since its subject is a servant rather than the mistress of the house. In the absorption of his sitters and the lavishness of their settings, Paxton's scenes are not only indebted to the example of Vermeer but also echo contemporary examples of fellow Bostonians Edmund C. Tarbell, Frank W. Benson, and Joseph De Camp, who likewise frequently depicted women in domestic activities. Recent scholarship has suggested that such depictions soothed conservative social anxieties at a time when women fought for larger roles outside the home. Whatever the politics, paintings such as this pleased cultivated tastes by offering exquisitely painted old-master traditions in accessibly contemporary settings.