The Window Seat

The following information was published by Jonathan Boos Gallery for the sale of the painting in October 2023

The Window Seat is one of Millet’s earliest English genre scenes. It depicts a sitting room in a quaint English cottage, with the artist’s wife, Lily, busily engaged in handiwork. Lily wears an early nineteenth-century muslin dress and fichu and sits on the deep windowsill with her feet propped on the turned-backed, rush-seated chair. The figure sits close to the window, using the natural light to complete her needlework, a symbol of the domestic sphere that was increasingly valued in the late nineteenth century. The room in which she works is a simple, utilitarian space with muslin curtains, spare furniture, and several decorative objects such as the clay glazed vase that holds a bouquet of wildflowers. With its emphasis on color, light, and the theme of domesticity, The Window Seat shows Millet’s influence of Dutch Old Master paintings.

More than an idealized domestic genre scene, The Window Seat is a careful study of light. Millet skillfully depicts a stream of luminous sunlight passing into the cottage through the expansive windows. The light softly filters through the ethereal white curtains and the figure’s gauzy dress, creating an aura around the figure. Millet subtly paints the reflection of the sunlight off the polished wooden table and the ledge on which the figure sits. Millet’s use of contrasting colors and his handling of white paint to depict the effects of sunlight echoes Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, where color was the primary subject.

Before establishing himself as a major figure in the Broadway artist’s colony, Millet spent several seasons at Lechlade, a small village in Oxfordshire, England, where illustrator and painter Edwin Austin Abbey was known to work. Millet purportedly staged his composition for The Window Seat at The Swan Inn in Lechlade, a sixteenth century posting tavern that was a window to the past. In 1882, Abbey used a similar room and subject for his watercolor The Two Sisters, originally published in Harper’s Magazine in 1883. Abbey’s painting depicts two young women wearing early nineteenth century clothing and playing the pianoforte, a suitable domestic activity.

Millet led a very productive career, achieving numerous accomplishments in addition to his easel paintings. He was actively involved in many international world’s fairs, working in various roles as juror, decorator, advisor, and muralist for fairs in Philadelphia, Vienna, Chicago, Paris and Tokyo. Millet also worked on interior decorative schemes with John La Farge at Trinity Church, Boston, and with Louis Comfort Tiffany on the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York in 1880. Millet also accepted painting commissions, completing murals in the US Customs House in Baltimore, the Minnesota State Capital, and the Federal Building and the Cleveland Trust Company building in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1891, Millet was elected as vice president of The National Academy of Design in New York. He later founded the American Federation of Arts and was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.