Elizabeth Okie Paxton (1877–1971); 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. Okie Paxton utilized light, texture, and color like that of other artists of the Boston School.... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Okie_Paxton) A painting like The Breakfast Tray makes us want to know the artist. The collection of letters that remain document business transactions about her artist-husband’s work, giving us little personal information about her except that she was familiarly known as Betty. Okie Paxton worked within the Boston School of artists, with their focus on beauty, harmony, light, color, clarity, and naturalistic representations of the everyday luxurious world of Boston’s elite. They guarded this domain, even as the modern artistic swell moved past them. To avoid competing with her husband’s traditional interiors, Okie Paxton painted still life works, finding a ready market with private collectors. Consequently, very few of her paintings are available for public viewing in a museum. Early in her career, she gives us The Breakfast Tray, a work so daring and so unlike the Boston School aesthetic. The interior was a favored subject, but this one is casually messy, middle class, and blatantly sexual. It palpates with an intimacy that makes the viewer a part of what has just happened and what will happen next. We know that Okie Paxton was about 33 years old and married when she painted The Breakfast Tray. Are we witnessing their marital bed?... (http://arttimesjournal.com/art/Art_Essays/summer-14-rena-tobey/elizabeth-okie-paxton.html) undefined

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