Il tè del pomeriggio

Richard Miller was an American painter who, around 1910, was living at Giverny in northern France, the village where Claude Monet had his garden and where a colony of young Americans gathered to paint in his shadow. This picture comes from those years. Two women take tea outdoors in strong sunlight, and Miller frames them with a Japanese parasol, using its curve to pull together a jumble of patterns and bright colour. That taste for Japanese things ran through the whole group. The painting later dropped out of sight for years, known only from a mention in Miller's own scrapbook, until a curator in Indianapolis tracked it down and brought it into the museum's American Impressionist collection.