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Lawton Parker’s canvas—framed, varnished, meticulous—lay patiently in wait in his little Paris studio the eve before it was set to be sent off to the jury of the 1900 Paris Salon. Those judges never did see the finished image. That same night, an unlucky sprinkling of blazing soot from a poorly placed stovepipe crept across the painting, eating and eating until there was nothing left. Parker had a week to whip up something new, settling quickly on a life-size figure painting of a model admiring her nude form, smooth and sinuously curved in the classic French style of Ingres and Cabanel. It was lovely, perfectly serviceable—it even earned him honors from the Salon that year. But in the vacant frame that the fire left, new visions had started to emerge for Parker. They were looser, freer, moving into a light that the academy hadn’t yet grown accustomed to. “At the Table” is one of several sketches by Parker from the turn of the twentieth century featuring a solo woman and her rituals around hot caffeinated beverages. The drawings range in formality, from more prim and posed figures presumably destined for a painted portrait to the more languorous, spontaneous gestures found in “At the Table.” It’s tempting to trace an even line of artistic progression for Parker through these images, someone gradually loosening the reigns of his disciplined precision (Parker studied at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux Arts) and finally allowing his hand (and, by extension, the women he depicted) to relax into a newfound freedom. But although Parker enthusiastically joined the international cohort gathering around Monet at Giverny in the summer of 1903, his artistic pendulum still swung back to more traditional portraits and Salon entries from time to time, a wavering uncertainty that may, too, have held connections to broader societal concerns about the changing roles of women. Anxiety around the “féministes” of fin-de-siecle France was plentiful. As more and more women began marching around Paris in culottes, demanding equality in voting and in all things, they were met apace with backlash efforts to keep them confined to and contented with the life of the wife and mother at home. But the world was creeping in there, too, sending the seemingly tranquil hetero-patriarchal structure of the domestic sphere into a flurry of rapid transformation—a copy of Marguerite Durand’s feminist publication La Fronde could easily slip across the threshold of a front entrance, after all, and salons hosted by the likes of Natalie Clifford Barney turned living rooms and parlors into places where radical ideas about politics and art could be freely exchanged. “At the Table” seems like a nod to this shifting moment. The confining aspects of womanhood haven’t disappeared completely—there’s an organic wall of plants separating this scene from a larger world, the fence or perhaps guardrail reinforcing the desire to hold things in place, just as they are, and of course the tea kettle and place settings, with their attendant associations of serving others. But this woman’s pose says something else. An elbow on the table, an arm thrown across the back of a chair, legs spread apart for comfort beneath the long drape of her dress. This time is hers. And the space, too—the balcony itself ambiguously toes the line between interior and exterior, and thus between the rigid expectations of the roles of wives and mothers within the buttoned-up bourgeois home and the unbridled freedom of something else entirely. This was a freedom Parker continued to expand on. In his “Tea Time on the Veranda,” the woman on the balcony is standing now, staring out towards something we viewers aren’t privy to. And in Parker’s 1912 solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, there was “Amaryllis,” a painting of a woman who had departed the balcony entirely in favor of the lawn, taking her tea in the full sun, looking back at us with an expression that’s tricky to read but carries a note of impatience, as if to ask just when is it we might finally catch up to her. If you would like to inquire about this work, head here.
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