The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me,
And I cannot, cannot go.
-Emily Bronte, ‘The Night is Darkening Around Me’
…Please click “more” to see images of more literary portraits…
Maud began doing “Metrocard Paintings” when she was living in New York City in 2011. These miniature works are all painted in oil on the backs of New York City Metrocards, which accounts for the distinctive shape and hole in one side.
For her 2016 show at Susan Calloway Fine Arts, Maud created artworks inspired by such authors as Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Henry James, Stella Gibbons, Charlotte Bronte, Vita Sackville-West, and Oscar Wilde. Her works particularly feature strong women from literature. A selection of plein air paintings from her travels in France, England, and Italy were included, as well as a miniature paintings on the backs of New York City Metrocards, which featured a range of portraits, landscapes and cityscapes, and still life.
The exhibition ran from December 2nd, 2016 through January 7th, 2017 at Susan Calloway Fine Arts, which is located at 1643 Wisconsin Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20007. Some of the works are can still be seen at the gallery.
The show runs from January 13th through March 4th, 2018.
My painting “Summer” is also featured in the exhibition.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
Flora inherited, however, from her father a strong will and from her mother a slender ankle. The one had not been impaired by always having her own way nor the other by the violent athletic sports in which she had been compelled to take part, but she realized that neither was adequate as an equipment for earning her keep.
-Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
–Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Well,” said Henrietta, “you think you can lead a romantic life, that you can live by pleasing yourself and pleasing others. You’ll find you’re mistaken. Whatever life you lead you must put
your soul in it–to make any sort of success of it; and from the moment you do that it ceases to be romance, I assure you: it becomes grim reality! And you can’t always please yourself; you must sometimes please other people. That, I admit, you’re very ready to do; but there’s another thing that’s still more important–you must often displease others. You must always be ready for that–you must never shrink from it. That doesn’t suit you at all–you’re too fond of admiration, you like to be thought well of. You think we can escape disagreeable duties by taking romantic views–that’s your great illusion, my dear. But we can’t. You must be prepared on many occasions in life to please no one at all–not even yourself.”
—Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
‘Were you happy when you painted these pictures?’ asked Mr.Rochester presently.
‘I was absorbed, sir: yes, and I was happy. To paint them, in short, was to enjoy one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known.’
‘That is not saying much. Your pleasures, by your own account, have been few; but I daresay you did exist in a kind of artist’s dreamland while you blent and arranged these strange tints.
-Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
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
The taxi drew up at a wonderful shop—the sort of shop I would never dare to walk through without a reason. We went in by way of the glove and stocking department, but there were things from other departments just dotted about; bottles of scent and a little glass tree with cherries on it and a piece of white branched coral on a sea-green chiffon scarf. Oh, it was an artful place—it must make people who have money want to spend it madly!
The pale grey carpets were as springy as moss and the air was scented; it smelled a bit like bluebells but richer, deeper.
“What does it smell of, exactly?” I said. And Rose said:
“Heaven.”
-Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
What can the biographer do when his subject has put him in the predicament in which Orlando has now put us? Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder. Therefore—since sitting in a chair and thinking is precisely what Orlando is doing now—there is nothing for it but to recite the calendar, tell one’s beads, blow one’s nose, stir the fire, look out of the window, until she has done. Orlando sat so still that you could have heard a pin drop. Would, indeed, that a pin had dropped! That would have been life of a kind.
-Virginia Woolf, Orlando
-George Meredith, Love in the Valley
-Emily Bronte, The Night is Darkening Round Me
-Oscar Wilde, Her Voice
Miranda. Sweet lord, you play me false.
-William Shakespeare, The Tempest
‘Everything suits her so—especially her pearls. They go so with her old lace. I’ll trouble you really to look at them.’ Densher, though aware he had seen them before, had perhaps not ‘really’ looked at them, and had thus not done justice to the embodied poetry…. ‘She’s a dove,’ Kate went on, ‘and one somehow doesn’t think of doves as bejeweled. Yet they suit her down to the ground.’
-Henry James, The Wings of the Dove
To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
-Walter Pater, The Renaissance
I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.
-Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
View of the Louvre from the Tuilleries, Paris, Oil on Paper, 4.5 x 6
…Please click “more” to see images of more plein air paintings…
These miniature works are all painted in oil on the backs of New York City Metrocards, which is why they have the distinctive shape with one cut corner and a hole in one side. They are all 2-1/8 x 3-1/4 inches, and they were all painted in 2016.
Still Life with Books and a Vase
…Please click “more” to see images of more metrocard paintings…
Maud Taber-Thomas teaches drawing and painting classes at the Yellow Barn Studio at Glen Echo. Please scroll down to learn more about her current course offerings, and click the links for materials lists and syllabi.
All classes take place at
Glen Echo Park. 7300 MacArthur Blvd, Glen Echo, MD, 20812
To register, please call 301.634.2226 or visit the Glen Echo Park website.
DISCOVER PAINTING TECHNIQUES
The goal of this class is to provide a strong foundation for painters. Learn about composition, building a painting, color theory, and paint application. Projects will include still life, figures, and landscapes. Open to all experience levels. Model fee extra. Minimum age 13.
9 Sessions
Mon 9:30am-12pm
January 25, 2016 – March 21, 2016
Click here to register for the class
Click here for the Discover Painting Techniques Materials and Syllabus
PAINTING FROM PHOTOS
Learn to use photographs to create beautiful and believable paintings. Students will have the opportunity to paint the subject matter of their choice—from portraits of loved ones to far away landscapes to lively scenes—while receiving instruction in painting techniques and advice on the challenges of working from photos. All skill levels. Minimum age 16.
9 Sessions
Mon 1-3:30pm
January 25, 2016 – March 21, 2016
Click here to register for the class
Click here for the Painting from Photos Materials List and Syllabus
CREATING A LIKENESS: PORTRAIT PAINTING TECHNIQUES
Become a master portraitist in this fun and intensive class! Paint from beautiful model setups inspired by master paintings. Learn from lectures and demonstrations on anatomy, creating a likeness, mixing color for flesh tones, and capturing personality. More experienced students are welcome to work at their own pace. All skill levels. Model fee extra. Minimum age 13.
9 Sessions
Tues 9:30am-12pm
January 26, 2016 – March 22, 2016
Click here to register for the class
Click here for the Creating a Likeness Portrait Painting Techniques Materials and Syllabus
Maud Taber-Thomas’s 2014 show at Susan Calloway Fine art in Washington, DC took its name from a line from the Tennyson Poem Maud: A Monodrama. The show featured fourteen large portrait paintings and one charcoal drawing, which were all inspired by literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The artworks were displayed with quotations from the books and poems that inspired them.
2013, oil on panel, 20 x 16”
Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone;
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
And the musk of the rose is blown.
For a breeze of morning moves,
And the planet of Love is on high,
Beginning to faint in the light that she loves
In a bed of daffodil sky,
To faint in the light of the sun she loves,
To faint in his light, and to die.
-Tennyson, Maud: A Monodrama
2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 48”
“Well,” said Henrietta, “you think you can lead a romantic life, that you can live by pleasing yourself and pleasing others. You’ll find you’re mistaken. Whatever life you lead you must put
your soul in it–to make any sort of success of it; and from the moment you do that it ceases to be romance, I assure you: it becomes grim reality! And you can’t always please yourself; you must sometimes please other people. That, I admit, you’re very ready to do; but there’s another thing that’s still more important–you must often displease others. You must always be ready for that–you must never shrink from it. That doesn’t suit you at all–you’re too fond of admiration, you like to be thought well of. You think we can escape disagreeable duties by taking romantic views–that’s your great illusion, my dear. But we can’t. You must be prepared on many occasions in life to please no one at all–not even yourself.”
—Henry James, Portrait of a Lady
2012, oil on panel, 16 x 16”
To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
-Walter Pater, The Renaissance
2011, oil on canvas, 44 x 96”
Look upward where the white gull screams,
What does it see that we do not see?
Is that a star? or the lamp that gleams
On some outward voyaging argosy,–
Ah! can it be
We have lived our lives in a land of dreams!
How sad it seems.
-Oscar Wilde, Her Voice
2013, oil on panel, 11 x 14”
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 48”
If thou be’st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see…
-John Donne, Song: Go and catch a falling star
2014, Oil on Canvas, 36 x 48”
The taxi drew up at a wonderful shop—the sort of shop I would never dare to walk through without a reason. We went in by way of the glove and stocking department, but there were things from other departments just dotted about; bottles of scent and a little glass tree with cherries on it and a piece of white branched coral on a sea-green chiffon scarf. Oh, it was an artful place—it must make people who have money want to spend it madly!
The pale grey carpets were as springy as moss and the air was scented; it smelled a bit like bluebells but richer, deeper.
“What does it smell of, exactly?” I said. And Rose said:
“Heaven.”
-Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
2013, charcoal on arches, 44.5 x 80”
‘T is you that are the music, not your song.
The song is but a door which, opening wide,
Lets forth the pent-up melody inside,
Your spirit’s harmony, which clear and strong
Sings but of you. Throughout your whole life long
Your songs, your thoughts, your doings, each divide
This perfect beauty; waves within a tide,
Or single notes amid a glorious throng.
-Amy Lowell, Listening
2014, oil on panel, 16 x 20”
O somewhere, meek, unconscious dove
That sittest ranging golden hair;
And glad to find thyself so fair,
Poor child, that waitest for thy love!
For now her father’s chimney glows
In expectation of a guest;
And thinking “this will please him best,”
She takes a riband or a rose;
For he will see them on to-night;
And with the thought her colour burns;
And, having left the glass, she turns
Once more to set a ringlet right;
And, even when she turn’d, the curse
Had fallen, and her future Lord
Was drown’d in passing thro’ the ford,
Or kill’d in falling from his horse.
-Tennyson, In Memoriam
2013, oil on canvas, 36 x 48”
Ay! though the gorgèd asp of passion feed
On my boy’s heart, yet have I burst the bars,
Stood face to face with Beauty, known indeed
The Love which moves the Sun and all the stars!
-Oscar Wilde, Apologia
2010, oil on panel, 9 x 12”
Directly we glance at Orlando standing by the window, we must admit that he had eyes like drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them; and a brow like the swelling of a marble dome pressed between the two blank medallions which were his temples. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, thus do we rhapsodize.
–Virginia Woolf, Orlando
2011, oil on canvas, 64 x 64”
What can the biographer do when his subject has put him in the predicament in which Orlando has now put us? Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder. Therefore—since sitting in a chair and thinking is precisely what Orlando is doing now—there is nothing for it but to recite the calendar, tell one’s beads, blow one’s nose, stir the fire, look out of the window, until she has done. Orlando sat so still that you could have heard a pin drop. Would, indeed, that a pin had dropped! That would have been life of a kind.
-Virginia Woolf, Orlando
2013, oil on panel, 14 x 11”
Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say;
Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday?
-Edward FitzGerald, trans., The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
2009, oil on panel, 11 x 14”
All night have the roses heard
The flute, violin, bassoon;
All night has the casement jessamine stirr’d
To the dancers dancing in tune;
Till a silence fell with the waking bird,
And a hush with the setting moon.
-Alfred Lord Tennyson, Maud: A Monodrama
2014, Oil on Panel, 12 x 16”
“…and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.”
Maud Taber-Thomas is an artist who specializes in oil paintings and charcoal drawings. Trained in classical drawing and painting at the New York Academy of Art, Maud studied Victorian and Medieval literature at Bowdoin College and Oxford University before turning her attention more fully to the fine arts. Maud draws inspiration for her evocative portraits, interiors, and landscapes from the narratives and characters of classic literature and history. Her works, which range in scale from miniature to larger than life, capture the vibrant light and color of far-off places and distant time periods. Maud Taber-Thomas lives in Silver Spring, Maryland and teaches drawing and paintings classes at the National Gallery of Art and the Yellow Barn Studio at Glen Echo. Her drawings and paintings have been shown at a number of galleries in the Washington, DC area and in New York. Her work is represented by Susan Calloway Fine Arts, in Washington, DC.
For questions about purchasing or commissioning artwork, please contact Maud at
m.taber.thomas@gmail.com
If music and sweet poetry agree,
As they must needs, the sister and the brother,
Then must the love be great ‘twixt thee and me,
Because thou lov’st the one, and I the other….
One god is god of both, as poets feign;
One knight loves both, and both in thee remain.
-William Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s sonnet “If music and sweet poetry agree,” highlights the beautiful bond between two seemingly separate art forms, music and poetry. In the spirit of Shakespeare, artist Maud Taber-Thomas creates luminous drawings and paintings that embody a loving conversation between several different art forms. A passionate scholar of classic literature, an avid classical musician, an eager European traveler, and an aficionado of past time periods, Maud Taber-Thomas interweaves all of these interests into her artwork. Her paintings tell the stories that she discovers in Victorian and Medieval literature, capture the vibrant light and color of far-off places and distant time periods, and weave together symbols in compositions reminiscent of polyphonic music.
The classicism and rigor that Maud admires so much in the classic works of literature and music that influence her is key to her own creation of artwork. Trained in academic painting techniques, Maud’s artistic process is strongly tied to the skills employed by artists from past generations, from the Renaissance Tenebrists, to the French Rococo painters, to the Pre-Raphaelites and the Impressionist portraitists. Working in miniature, on a larger than life scale, and every size in between, Maud endows all of her works with a sense of the fleeting nature of light, a celebration of color, and a sympathetic and tranquil sense of peace and thoughtfulness. Many of her works feature sensitive portraits that evoke the complex inner life of her subjects, hinting at stories that transcend the single moment that can be depicted in a visual artwork. Maud’s drawings and paintings exist within a peaceful conversation between the many art forms that she loves. In her work, music, sweet poetry—and the fine arts—agree.
During the summer of 2008, Maud Taber-Thomas had a research fellowship from Bowdoin College to study the philosophy and painting techniques of the Pre-Raphaelites. The project inspired her to do a series of paintings that explore Pre-Raphaelite ideas.
Maud Taber-Thomas completed these paintings on a residency in beautiful Giverny, France over the summer of 2011. They are all painted on paper prepared with shellac, and they are very small, ranging from 1-1/2 to 12 inches in dimension. All are painted from life.
