Woman Seated in a Garden

Painted in 1875 and held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, this garden scene by Eliphalet Frazer Andrews—a Washington D.C.-based painter who was a pupil of Couture in Paris—depicts a woman seated in the domestic outdoor space of a garden. Andrews was active in Washington's cultural life and produced portraits and genre scenes that reflect his academic European training filtered through American sensibilities. A woman in a garden offered him a combination of figure painting and outdoor light that was popular in both French and American painting of the period.

Andrews renders the seated figure with the academic training he received from Couture, the figure carefully modeled in warm flesh tones within the dappled outdoor light of the garden setting. The surrounding vegetation provides a soft green and cream context that the woman's dress either contrasts with or echoes, depending on Eliphalet's specific coloristic choices for her costume.