The Seamstress

A founding member of the group of artists known as the Ten American Painters, Joseph DeCamp was one of the leading figures of American Impressionism and the Boston art scene in the early decades of the twentieth century. _The Seamstress_, an example of DeCamp's mature style, masterfully balances description and mood, solid modeling and ethereal effect, immediacy and extended looking. DeCamp completed the painting only when specific weather and light conditions prevailed, explaining that he needed a "couple of grey days [to] turn the trick." The result is a painting that flickers with differing textures –impasto (thickly-applied paint) next to fine brushstrokes – and luminous shades of white and gray, from the ruffled curtains and the glimmer of the outside seen through the window to the simple blouse of the seamstress and mottled reflections on the table.

DeCamp's _The Seamstress_ portrays a subject well known to the Boston School: sun-dappled interiors with women by windows offered the artists a way to experiment with light and color. These domestic vignettes of women engaged in the quotidian—performing household chores, reading, or absorbed in other forms of leisure – not only recall the quiet, still, interiors of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer but also suggest a nostalgic set of attitudes and beliefs toward women that was losing its foothold in the twentieth century as more and more women entered the workforce.