WILLIAM MCGREGOR PAXTON 1869-1941
Sylvia, 1908
Oil on canvas, 49 X 391/2" (124.46 x 100-33 cm.)
Signed, upper right
Museum purchase, 917-0-105

When William Paxton completed Sylvia, he was an artist entering the prime of his creative life. An esteemed portraitist, a respected teacher, and a prolific painter with a growing list of exhibition credits, the thirty- nine -year- old Paxton had assumed his place as a mature member of the Boston School. Sylvia exemplifies his confident draughtsmanship, his gifts as a colorist, and his undeniable preference for elegant figural subjects.
Paxton grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb. He studied under Dennis Miller Bunker at Cowles Art School in Boston, and in 1889 embarked for Paris and four years of study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Acad6mie Julian. The precise drawing and smooth surface texture employed by Jean-Leon Gerome, his teacher, were abiding influences. By 1893, Paxton had returned to Newton and soon began to support himself as a portraitist, and to participate in numerous exhibitions and art clubs. A trip to Madrid in 1897 allowed him intense study of the works of Diego Velazquez.
Paxton's first one-man show at the St. Botolph Club of Boston in 1900 brought positive critical reviews; the second show saved many of his best works from a fire that destroyed his studio in 1904. The next year Paxton joined his senior Boston School colleagues, Edmund Tarbell and Frank Benson, in the new Fenway Studio Building and, in 1906, on the faculty of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. By 1907, Paxton had perfected his version of the subject that remains the hallmark of the Boston School: elegant women in well-appointed parlors. Like Tarbell, Paxton took inspiration from the luminous effects and intimate settings of the seventeenth- century Dutch master Jan Vermeer. In 1913, Paxton assisted artist/critic Philip Hale in editing the first American book on Vermeer.
Not all of Paxton's work was divided between commissioned portraits and domestic interiors with subtle narrative elements. Paxton often chose to paint figural studies of beautiful models, deftly posed within shallow studio settings. Sylvia epitomizes this genre, in which Paxton placed the model's arms and hands into an unusual-yet still graceful configuration to create what his pupil, Ives Gammell, termed "handsome arabesques." The delicate chair and Japanese screen were standard accoutrements of a proper Boston School studio. In this canvas Paxton contrasts the screen's rectangular panels with the gentle curves of his fashionable subject. For a consummate colorist with an instinct for piquant harmonies, the subtle grays and tans of Sylvia might seem like great artistic self-restraint. Yet Paxton's delicate modeling and textural distinctions produce a rich tonal range, suffused with the soft light he consistently favored. While the model gazes directly at the viewer, her expression is ambiguous. One Boston critic called her "arch, roguish, half-timid and halfbold.112 The same woman, wearing the same gown but holding her arms overhead and gazing at a necklace, appears in another 1908 canvas of the same dimensions, The String of Pearls (1908, private collection). The screen that closes the composition in Sylvia has been replaced by an oval mirror, opening up the painting's background. Though Paxton never exhibited the pictures as a pair, their variations in pose and setting seem to act as foils in Paxton's rich repertoire of composition design. After circulation in several major exhibitions, Sylvia was purchased in 1910 by the American collector George A. Hearn.
Paxton's commissions and exhibition participation continued at a vigorous pace, and by 1935 he had earned more popular prizes than any other American artist. In New York, however, where the genteel subjects and style of the Boston School were less revered, Paxton's solo exhibitions, in 1919 and 1926, met with mixed reviews. His experience was symptomatic of that of the Boston School as a whole as their leadership role was eclipsed by the shift of attention to modernist painting.
Sylvia was one of sixty-five works in Paxton's memorial exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A local critic reported that Sylvia was actually a Virginia belle of a different name and that Paxton borrowed his title from a popular song. If that is the case, the artist may well have been painting his response to:

"Who is Sylvia? What is she?"

These questions, written by William Shakespeare, became the lyrics of one of Franz Schubert's best loved art songs. With his enigmatic reply to Shakespeare's query and Schubert's haunting melody, Paxton sustains Sylvia's mystique.

ELLEN LEE