Writing

Gari Melchers

Oil on canvas

Belmont, Gari Melchers Home and Studio

Writing is an intimate domestic interior depicting a woman—almost certainly the artist's wife, Corinne Lawton Mackall Melchers, who regularly served as his model—absorbed in the act of writing at a table beside sheer-curtained windows that filter and diffuse the sunlight. Melchers employed a vibrant Impressionist palette of warm reds, pinks, and oranges accented by complementary greens and pale blues, building the surface with a full, confident brush. The scene was painted at Schuylenburg, the former Dutch home of fellow American expatriate George Hitchcock near the Egmonds in Holland, a setting Melchers returned to repeatedly between 1905 and 1909. The work is closely related to the tradition of Dutch interior painting exemplified by Vermeer and places Melchers within a broader current of American Impressionism, alongside contemporaries such as Edmund Tarbell and Childe Hassam, who similarly explored the theme of women in sunlit domestic spaces.