Maud Taber-Thomas

Please contact the artist at m.taber.thomas@gmail.com for information on availability and pricing. Additional artworks can be found at Susan Calloway Fine Arts.

Elizabeth Bennett: Pride and Prejudice

Oil on Canvas, 30 x 40”, 2016

Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody; and Darcy had never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by her.

 -Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Summer

Summer, 2016, Oil on Panel, 12 x 16

Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow,

Swift as the swallow along the river’s light

Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored winglets,

Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight.

-George Meredith, ‘Love in the Valley’

The Tempest: “Where the bee sucks, there suck I”

Oil on Panel, 12 x 12”, 2016

Where the bee sucks. there suck I:
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

 -William Shakespeare, The Tempest

The Weird Sisters

Charcoal on Arches, 44.5 x 60″, 2018

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air.”

–Macbeth, William Shakespeare

Fanfare in Purple and Gold

Oil on Canvas, 24 x 30”, 2015

Art is a goddess of dainty thought, reticent of habit, abjuring all obtrusiveness, purposing in no way to better others. She is, withal selfishly occupied with her own perfection only – having no desire to teach.

 -James Abbott McNeill Whistler, ‘Ten O’Clock Lecture’

Lady Slane: All Passion Spent

Oil on Canvas, 36 x 48”, 2016

Sitting there in the sun at Hampstead, in the late summer, under the south wall and the ripened peaches, doing nothing with her hands, she remembered the day she had become engaged to Henry. She had plenty of leisure now, day in, day out, to survey her life as a tract of country traversed, ….And what, precisely, had been herself, she wondered—an old woman looking back on the girl she had once been? This wondering was the softest, most wistful, of occupations; yet it was not melancholy; it was, rather, the last, supreme luxury; a luxury she had waited all her life to indulge. There was just time, in this reprieve before death, to indulge herself to the full. She had, after all, nothing else to do. For the first time in all her life—no, for the first time since her marriage—she had nothing else to do. She could lie back against death and examine life. Meanwhile, the air was full of the sound of bees.

-Vita Sackville-West, All Passion Spent

Lawrence Seldon: House of Mirth

Oil on Canvas, 36 x 48, 2016

He had seated himself on an arm of the chair near which she was standing, and she continued to question him…

‘Don’t you ever mind,’ she asked suddenly, ‘not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?’

He followed her glance about the room, with its worn furniture and shabby walls.

‘Don’t I just? Do you take me for a saint on a pillar?’

‘And having to work—do you mind that?’

‘Oh, the work itself is not so bad—I’m rather fond of the law.’

‘No; but the being tied down: the routine—don’t you ever want to get away, to see new places and people?’

‘Horribly—especially when I see all my friends rushing to the steamer.’

She drew a sympathetic breath. ‘But do you mind enough—to marry to get out of it?’

Selden broke into a laugh. ‘God forbid!’ he declared.

 -Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

Athena

Athena, 2016, Oil on Canvas, 36 x 48

O, warlike Pallas…
Gymnastic virgin of terrific mind,
Dire Gorgon’s bane, unmarried, blessed, kind:
Mother of arts, impetuous; understood,
Rage to the wicked, wisdom to the good:
Female and male, the arts of war are thine…

Hear me, O Goddess, when to thee I pray,
With supplicating voice both night and day,
And in my latest hour, give peace and health,
Propitious times, and necessary wealth,
And, ever present, be thy votaries aid,
O, much implored, art’s parent, blue-eyed maid.

-Orphic Hymn to Athena

An Artful Place

Emily Tennyson

Reading the Rubaiyat: Study

11″ x 14″

Oil on Panel

2010

“Come in!” — the Mayor cried, looking bigger
And in did come the strangest figure!
His queer long coat from heel to head
Was half of yellow and half of red,
And he himself was tall and thin,
With sharp blue eyes, each like a pin,
And light loose hair, yet swarthy skin
No tuft on cheek nor beard on chin,
But lips where smile went out and in;
There was no guessing his kith and kin:
And nobody could enough admire
The tall man and his quaint attire.
Quoth one: “It’s as my great-grandsire,
“Starting up at the Trump of Doom’s tone,
“Had walked this way from his painted tombstone!”

-“The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” Robert Browning