William McGregor Paxton attended Cowles Art School, Acadamie Julian (1889-90, 92) and Ecole Des Beaux Arts, where he studied under the painter Gerome. Paxton was an integral part of the Boston School, a group of painters that included Tarbell, Benson and Hale. He was well known for his extraordinary attention to the effects of light and detail in flesh and fabric. Paxton's compositions were most often idealized young women in beautiful interiors. Paxton gained fame for his portraiture and painted both Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge. He taught at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School from 1906 to 1913. His highly finished surfaces, painted in the Beaux Arts manner, seemed to emphasize material surroundings and Paxton had been criticized for imitating the superficiality of the high class. Paxton was made a full member of the Nation Academy of Design in 1928.

Biography courtesy of The Caldwell Gallery, www.antiquesandfineart.com/caldwell

Prominent Boston painter William McCregor Paxton is known for his portraits, murals and genre paintings, although he experimented widely in other media, including etching and lithography. Born in 1869 in Baltimore, Paxton grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. He studied art at the Cowles School in Boston under Dennis Miller Bunker and then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris with Jean Leon Gerome.

Returning to Boston, Paxton supplemented his income by designing newspaper ads while studying with Edmund Tarbell, Frank Benson and Joseph DeCamp: he then joined the faculty at the school of the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston. Paxton, well known for his portraits, was dubbed the "court painter of Philadelphia" for those he painted during the brief period he lived there. Among his prominent works are portraits of Presidents Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge. Also notable are murals he executed for the Army and Navy Club of New York City and for the St. Botolph Club of Boston.

However, it is his paintings of attractive young women of the leisure class, presented in an artful and idealized fashion, for which he is best remembered. These paintings recall the works of Jan Vermeer in their extraordinary attention to details of flesh and textiles and the effects of reflected light, and are characterized by highly finished surfaces in the beaux arts manner.

While these paintings focused on the content of daily life, the emphasis on the details of material surroundings was criticized as imitating the superficiality of society pictures by European painters, which were fashionable at the time. However, this emphasis on detail resulted from Paxton's theory of "binocular vision," a way of seeing about which he commented: "...a man looking out through two eyes sees things with a certain single focus, and outside that focus, all vertical lines and vertically inclined spots double." This led him to paint objects outside his focus by slightly blurring them.

Always academically oriented, Paxton became a full member of the Natioanl Academy of Design in 1928. He died in Boston in 1941.

From 300 Years of American Art, Michael David Zellman, The Wellfleet Press, New Jersey, 1987.

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton