The Tea Service

What you are looking at

A table covered with a white cloth, woven in a faint check pattern, runs across the lower two-thirds of the picture. On it, toward the right, sits a bright red lacquer tray holding a small blue-and-white teapot and two matching cups on saucers, one with dark tea still in it. To the left a blue-and-white porcelain bowl or cachepot holds a plant with large, soft, gray-green leaves that curl and droop over the rim. A silver teaspoon lies on the cloth in the foreground, its bowl catching a single highlight.

Behind the table the background is divided into two plain bands: a warm brown, perhaps a wooden sideboard or wainscot, and above it a cool gray-green wall. There is nothing else in the room. Monet signed the canvas at the lower left.

Where and when it was painted

Monet returned to France from the Netherlands in late 1871 with Camille and their son Jean and, after a few weeks in Paris, rented a house at Argenteuil, a short train ride down the Seine. The house had an outbuilding he could use as a studio. Although he spent most of his time painting outdoors along the river, in 1872 he made a small number of still lifes indoors, of which The Tea Service is one.

The objects themselves place the picture in its moment. The blue-and-white porcelain and the red lacquer tray recall the fashion for Japanese and Chinese wares that swept Paris in the 1860s and 1870s, the same taste that would lead to La Japonaise four years later. The tea service is a sign of the comfortable domestic life Monet was building in Argenteuil, the same world seen in Jean Monet on His Mechanical Horse of the same year.

How it was painted

The composition is built in three layers: the white cloth in front, the objects in the middle, and the flat bands of the wall behind. Monet concentrates his effort on the middle layer and keeps the background almost blank, so the eye goes straight to the tray.

The picture is a study of surfaces. The lacquer tray is a flat, glossy red, with lighter streaks where it reflects the cups. The porcelain is a crisp white painted with quick blue marks for the decoration, and the curve of each cup is caught by a single highlight. The cloth is white, but Monet paints it in grays, blues and pale yellows, with fine lines for the weave and the folds, and uses it to lead the eye back in perspective. The plant's leaves are soft and velvety, painted with dragged strokes of gray-green over darker green. The teaspoon, metal on cloth, is a lesson in how little paint it takes to say "silver."

Red and green, the tray and the leaves, are complementary colors, and Monet sets them on opposite sides of the canvas, with the blue-and-white porcelain linking them.

Monet's still lifes

Still life was never Monet's main subject, but he returned to it at intervals: the dark, Courbet-like Still Life with Meat of 1864, Jar of Peaches of 1866, the fruit pictures of the late 1870s such as Still Life with Melon, and the flower pieces of 1878–82. The Tea Service stands apart for its lightness and its almost Japanese economy of arrangement.

Ownership

Paul Durand-Ruel bought the picture soon after it was painted. It was included in the 1886 exhibition of Impressionist paintings he organized in New York, the first major showing of the group in the United States. It later passed through private collections and was shown in exhibitions in the United States, Russia, Britain and France. It came to the Dallas Museum of Art through the bequest of Margaret McDermott (2019.67.12.McD).

Where to see it

The Tea Service is in the Dallas Museum of Art, which also holds Monet's The Pont Neuf. For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.