To quote dramatist Sir Arthur Pinero, Where there is tea, there is hope—and there is also a great deal of art. Whether capturing moments of leisure, reflection, loneliness or ennui, the steeping of tea leaves and setting out of cups and saucers has inspired many fine paintings, especially among the Impressionists and Post Impressionists.
Mary Cassatt’s The Tea
American French Impressionist Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) often used teatime in her work, including some of her best-known paintings, such as Lady at the Tea Table and The Cup of Tea.
Another notable Cassatt tea portrait is her 1880 The Tea (or Five O’Clock Tea), a fascinating study of two women seemingly lost in their own thoughts. They are indeed together having tea, yet only one woman drinks from a cup while the other stares detachedly ahead. The woman sipping tea also appears distracted and wears a hat and gloves, indicating that this may merely be a perfunctory visit or that she is about to hurry off to someplace else while her companion remains behind.
Beyond the ambiguous expressions of her tea drinkers, Cassatt further intrigues the eye with a lustrous silver tea set and striped wallpaper in a room that appears well-furnished, yet not exactly welcoming.
William McGregor Paxton’s Tea Leaves
Boston-based artist William McGregor Paxton (1869-1941) studied with American Impressionist Dennis Miller Bunker and French Academic Jean-Léon Gérôme. Finding further influence in Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, Paxton was often praised for his finesse in capturing the clarity of light and for his meticulously composed paintings.
Paxton’s 1909 Tea Leaves places two finely-dressed young women at a tea table. Social constraints appear to be momentarily relaxed and the women share an air of casual indifference; they are perhaps amusing themselves by looking for special symbols in the patterns of tea leaves formed at the bottom of their cups.
Paxton’s expert depiction of the hot water urn and teapot along with a bowl of lemons shows his skill, while his ladies dressed in white bring to mind Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth. Published during the same decade, The House of Mirth’s troubled heroine Lily Bart often drinks tea during her search for a rich husband, her graceful hands like polished ivory and her jeweled bracelets like “manacles chaining her to her fate.”
Frederick Carl Frieseke’s Hour of Tea
Michigan-born Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874-1839) attended the Art Institute of Chicago and later became an integral part of the American artist colony in Giverny, France. Giverny was the famed home base of Claude Monet, whose work inspired American Impressionists like Frieseke, Willard Metcalf, Lilla Cabot Perry and Theodore Robinson to take up residence and paint within Monet‘s distinctly beautiful realm.
Frieseke’s style tended toward smooth lines amid brightly dappled backdrops. His 1914 The Hour of Tea offers sun-drenched blue and white tones, with the focal point of a woman lounging on a chaise as she adjusts her hat against the light. At her side and partly shaded by a parasol , a couple sits nearby to join her for this informally formal outdoor tea. The mood—like many of Frieseke’s paintings—is pleasant and openly inviting, enhanced by the inclusion of patterned china cups and bunches of green grapes upon the tea tray.
Harold Gilman’s Tea in the Bedsitter
Harold Gilman (1876-1919) was part of the Camden Town Group of British Post-Impressionists, along with his friend and fellow artist Walter Sickert. Gilman’s career ended lamentably early due to the 1919 influenza pandemic, but prior to that he had managed to create a unique style of somber yet strongly hued interior portraits and landscapes.
Gilman’s 1916 Tea in the Bedsitter interestingly uses similar intense blue tones as Frieseke’s The Hour of Tea. Gilman’s work is deliberately confined, however, with the setting being a bedsitter or combined bedroom/sitting room. Still, while the painting’s backdrop is less spectacular and the blue lends a melancholic edge, there is a certain sense of familiar comfort to this teatime between women.
The empty chair at the table also seems to evoke a similar chair in Van Gogh’s Vincent's Bedroom in Arles, and Gilman was indeed influenced by Van Gogh’s passion for color and thick, expressive brushstrokes. Additionally, the painting’s World War I date might indicate that the empty seat was once filled by a soldier, someone who is obviously missed and who may or may not return.
Sources
- Frederick Carl Frieseke -- The Butler Institute of American Art
- William McGregor Paxton -- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
