The House Maid

William McGregor Paxton, along with his Boston School colleagues Edmund Tarbell, Frank Benson, and Joseph DeCamp, achieved institutional recognition and popular acclaim for paintings based on a single theme: a refined interior inhabited by a young woman as decorative as the still-life objects that surround her. _The House Maid_ depicts a uniformed servant engrossed in a book and standing behind a table on which a group of still-life objects is displayed.

With the exception of the open stationery box on the far left, most of the items represented in _The House Maid_ are East Asian: a white Chinese lidded jar, a vessel, a porcelain figure, and a Qing dynasty blue-and-white porcelain pot. All are reminders of New England's long history of trade with Asia.

The juxtaposition of Asian objects and a lovely woman was a typical motif in American turn-of-the-century painting. Reading was likewise a familiar and repeated subject: Paxton was unusual, however, in representing a servant rather than the usual lady of leisure. The items on the table are the housemaid's responsibility but are not her property.

Along with other members of the Boston School, Paxton was known to admire the paintings of Johannes Vermeer. In _The House Maid_, the stable triangular composition, muted palette, precisely rendered textures, meticulous arrangement, and sense of quiet absorption all have parallels in Vermeer's work.