...Clearly, Fiske is more than a "mere" Boston School painter (the metier of which seems to have been largely art for art's sake, in the form of exquisite impressionistic paintings of elegant haute-couteur women). Consider these two paintings of the same subject - women with bowls of goldfish - one by Fiske and one by a far more famous Boston School painter, Fiske's contemporary, Childe Hassam. Immediate observation: totally different moods. Hassam's impressionistic treatment is a technical tour-de-force of the painting of light, for which the subject is little more than a pretext. The woman could be standing next to a vase of daffodils and Hassam would have achieved the same effect. Not true of Fiske's treatment in the least. Fiske's painting, also a masterful treatment of light, is a somber meditation on the place of women in society. While Hassam's goldfish bowl contains an apparently random number of fish, in Fiske there is one for each woman, stressing the parallel relationship between them. Whereas Hassam has turned his figure's face outward, toward the outdoors, lending it the warm glow of reflected light, Fiske turns her figures' faces down and, by implication, inward, draping them in a veil of shadow as they brood upon the fish. Note how she subtly distorts the expression on the elongated face of the woman in white, while the other she clearly fixes in a darkened pout. The latter's hands rest upward in an expression of listlessness akin to despair. Behind the figures, Fiske has added strict vertical slats of light and shadow that suggest the bars of a cage. Artists had painted women with goldfish in many ways, but incredibly, no one had ever thought of expressing Fiske's plain and devastating message. (http://christophervolpe.blogspot.nl/2011/03/goldfiske.html)