Elizabeth Okie Paxton

Elizabeth Okie Paxton (1878–1972) was an American painter, married to another artist William McGregor Paxton (1869–1941). The Paxtons were part of the Boston School, a prominent group of artists known for works of beautiful interiors, landscapes, and portraits of their wealthy patrons. Her paintings were widely exhibited and sold well.

Early life Elizabeth Vaughan Okie was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and from Harvard in 1869. He died on October 29, 1902 in Boston. |group="nb" and Elizabeth Vaughn and had one sister Adele.

Education Okie Paxton studied painting at the Cowles Art School, with Joseph DeCamp and Ernest Major. She also took instruction from William McGregor Paxton, who had been a student at Cowles, during his brief tenure teaching at the school.

Marriage She was engaged in 1896 to William McGregor Paxton, Beginning in 1901, they traveled to Europe together.

As a great beauty, she served as his muse before and during their marriage, modeling for many of his works, like the painting in which she was dressed for the ball. The couple had no children, instead focusing their creative energy on their work. She moved to Boston's Fenway Studios after her husband died.

Career

Of the Bostonian women artists born in the 19th century, most came from families that provided sufficient financial means to open their own studios and pay for their education. Fortunately, Boston was a city that had a number of great teachers who would teach women, including her husband, William McGregor Paxton; Edmund C. Tarbell; Philip Hale; and William Morris Hunt. Education for women occurred in separate classes and at a higher cost than that for men. Women often went on to study in Europe. Generally women stuck to domestic and still life scenes. Many women married late, regardless of when they married, they often struggled with managing the traditional roles of wife and mother with their career as an artist. Okie Paxton, considered by one art critic to be a better painter than her husband, "painted ravishing still lifes of moments in time". But like Lilian Westcott Hale, who was also a talented artist married to an artist, her career was less important than that of her husband.

Okie Paxton utilized light, texture, and color like that of other artists of the Boston School.

The Breakfast Tray is a provocative bedroom scene. Rather than show pristine interiors typical of the Boston School, however, Okie Paxton depicted a sensual, messy environment, indicating a modern sensibility and sexuality of the occupants. Her work resembled Modernism, rather than the more traditional Boston School. Her work provided insight into a new emerging woman in the intimate details revealed in the painting:

Her work, The Breakfast Tray, —along with that of William Merritt Chase, Alice Neel, John Singleton Copley and Roy Lichtenstein— appears in Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine, edited by Judith A. Barter. Okie Paxton's work was represented in a 2001 exhibition of women artists at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts entitled "A Studio of Her Own:Women Artists in Boston 1870–1940". The works of Polly Thayer, Gertrude Fiske, Gretchen Rogers, Lilian Westcott Hale, and Ellen Day Hale were shown. Three of Paxton's works were exhibited: The Breakfast Tray ; The Open Window (1922), reminiscent of Johannes Vermeer; and the subtly hued Breakfast Still Life .