In the joint exhibition Wanderings at Susan Calloway Fine Arts, Maud, along with artist Rogers Naylor, share moments of poetic light and color in their landscape paintings from around the world. The show runs from February 22nd through March 21st.
Please scroll down for Metrocard and Plein Air Paintings.
For information about commissioning a portrait, please contact the artist at m.taber.thomas@gmail.com.
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, 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
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
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’
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
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
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’
Oil on Canvas, 36 x 48”, 2016Sitting 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
Oil on Canvas, 36 x 48, 2016He 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, 2016, Oil on Canvas, 36 x 48O, 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
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’
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’
‘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
Gwendolen. I had no idea there were any flowers in the country.
Cecily. Oh, flowers are as common here, Miss Fairfax, as people are in London.
-Oscar Wilde, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’
Jack. How can you sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.
Algernon. Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.
Jack. I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.
Algernon. When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, when I am in really great trouble, as any one who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. At the present moment I am eating muffins because I am unhappy. Besides, I am particularly fond of muffins.
-Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
‘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
Miranda. Sweet lord, you play me false.
-William Shakespeare, The Tempest
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
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
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
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
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
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
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’
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.
View of the Duomo, Florence
2019/Oil on Canvas/36 x 48
$4500
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Scottish Highlands
2019/Oil on Panel/30 x 40
$3900
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Notre Dame de Paris
2020/Oil on Canvas/ 36 x 48
$4500
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A Matter of Perspective: Raha and Matthew with the Tabula Rogeriana
2019/Oil on Canvas/24 x 28
$4900
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Ariadne
2019/ Historical Oil Paints, Gold Leaf, and Shell Gold on Vellum/ 3 x 2-1/4
$1200
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Green and Gold Afternoon Light
2019/Oil on Canvas/16 x 20
$1900
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Jane Eyre II: “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me.”
2017/Oil on Linen/16 x 20
$4200
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National Cathedral in Afternoon Light
2020/Oil on Canvas/11 x 14
$975
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Old Quad, Brasenose College, Oxford
2020/Oil on Canvas/ 30 x 40
$3900
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Radcliffe Camera, Bodleian Library, Oxford
2020/Oil on Canvas/24 x 36
$3500
Maud began doing “Metrocard Paintings” when she was living in New York City in 2011. These miniature works are painted in oil on the backs of either New York City Metrocards or DC SmartTrip Cards.
$250 each
Click here for more Information or to Purchase
Sunset, Washington National Cathedral
Sunset, Washington Monument
Sunset, Thomas Circle, DC III
Sunset, US Capitol
Sunset, Thomas Circle, DC II
Sunset, Thomas Circle, DC I
Sunset, Smithsonian Castle
Sunset, Oxford Spires
Sunset, 16th Street Churches, DC
Oxford, Radcliffe Camera
Oxford, Christ Church College Quad
Oxford, Brasenose College III
Oxford, Brasenose College II
Oxford, Brasenose College I
Notre Dame on a Grey Day, Paris
Ile de la Cite, Paris
Eilean Donan Castle, Scotland
Lake in the Scottish Highlands
These paintings were completed in one sitting on Maud’s travels. They are on small panels or paper prepared with shellac for easy transport. These works capture most accurately the light and color of specific places.
$350 each
Click here for more Information or to Purchase
Aspens and Blue Sky, Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Driggs, Idaho Fields
Driggs, Idaho View
Leigh Lake, Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Mormon Barn, Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Mountain View, Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Wyoming Cows
Head of School, Washington Latin Public Charter School, Washington, DC.
Oil on Canvas, 30 x 40″, 2019
On display in the Suffolk County Supreme Court Building in Riverhead, NY.
Oil on Canvas, 24×36″, 2017
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
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
These giant drawings of owls are all approximately 4 feet wide and 5-8 feet tall.
Charcoal on Arches
Installation at Saint Albans School, Washington, DC.
These are all done in oil on prepared paper, approximately 4 x 6″.
Ruskin’s View in the Lake District
Lake District Hillside
Lake District Pasture
View from Ruskin’s House in the Lake District
Rainstorm Arnisdale Scotland
Loch Hourn Scotland
Hills Across Loch Hourn Scotland
Arnisdale Cottage Scotland
Franciscan Church Salzburg
Hohensalzburg Fortress Salzburg
Stift Nonberg Abbey Salzberg
Monzee Lake Austria
Vanalhaven Maine Rocks
-Oscar Wilde, Her Voice
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
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”
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
In 2018, Maud Taber-Thomas contributed thirty pen and ink illustrations for the book Chance Particulars: A Writer’s Field Notebook for Travelers, Bloggers, Essayists, Memoirists, Novelists, Journalists, Adventurers, Naturalists, Sketchers, and Other Note-Takers and Recorders of Life, by Sara Mansfield Taber, published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
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.
In addition to the portraits, please scroll down to see a selection of plein air paintings from Maud’s travels in France, England, and Italy that were included, as well as a series of miniature paintings on the backs of New York City Metrocards.
The show runs from January 13th through March 4th, 2018.
My painting “Summer” is also featured in the exhibition.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
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
Ferris Wheel in the Tuilleries, Paris, Oil on Paper, 4.5 x 6
Lion and Diana Statues and the Luxembourg Garden, Paris, Oil on Paper, 4.5 x 6
Statues in the Tuilleries Garden, Paris, Oil on Paper, 4.5 x 6
Palace, Luxembourg Garden, Paris, Oil on Paper, 4.5 x 6
Luxembourg Garden, Paris, Oil on Paper, 4.5 x 6
Connemara I, Oil on Paper, 9 x 6
Connemara II, Oil on Paper, 9×7.25
Connemara III, Oil on Paper, 9 x 6
Connemara IV, Oil on Paper, 9 x 5.25
Connemara V, Oil on Paper, 9 x 5.25
Clifden Castle, Connemara, Oil on Paper, 9 x 4.75
Connemara VI, Oil on Paper, 9 x 5.75
Connemara VII, Oil on Paper, 9 x 4.5
Connemara VIII, Oil on Paper, 9 x 6.75
Grazing Sheep in Yorkshire, Oil on Paper, 4.5 x 6
Sligo Creek Autumn Foliage, Oil on Paper, 4.5 x 6
Sligo Creek, Oil on Paper, 4.5 x 6
Piazza Signoria, Florence, Oil on Paper, 4.5 x 6
View of the Duomo, Florence, Oil on Paper, 5.75 x 6.75
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
Carving and Tree in Oxford
Carving on Merton College, Oxford
Connemara Lake View
Cow in Connemara
Eagle Owl Landing
Gothic Street, York, England
Horse in Tully Cross, Connemara
King’s College Chapel, Cambridge
King’s College, Cambridge
Kylemore Abey, Connemara
Mercury by Pajou at the Louvre
Angel Outside the Bodleian, Oxford
Oxford Carving I
Oxford Carving II
Oxford Carving on Hertford College
Oxford Carving on St. Mary’s Church
Oxford View from St. Mary’s Church
Piazza del Campo, Siena
Piazza San Marco, Venice
San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
Siena Cathedral
Slovenia II
Slovenia III
Snowy Owl
St. John’s Bridge, Cambridge
The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe
The Pyramid at the Louvre
Tuscan Hill Town
Tuscan Hillside I
Tuscan Hillside II
Tuscan Hillside III
Venice at Twilight
View of Georgetown from Foggy Bottom
View Uptown from the World Trade Center I
View Uptown from the World Trade Center II
Washington View of Georgetown and the Cathedral
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, The 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 techniques at the New York Academy of Art, and with a background in English literature from Bowdoin College and Oxford University, where she studied abroad, Maud Taber-Thomas draws inspiration for her evocative portraits, interiors, and landscapes from the narratives and characters of classic literature. 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 Takoma Park, Maryland and teaches in the Drawing Salon program at the National Gallery of Art and at 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 City. She has been the recipient of a Terra Foundation residency in Giverny, France, a Summer Research Fellowship to study the Pre-Raphaelites at Bowdoin College, a Portrait Scholarship from the New York Academy of Art, and a residency in Greece with the Paedeia Institute. In 2019 she was awarded an Individual Artist Grant from the Maryland State Arts Council.
Maud Taber-Thomas contributed thirty pen illustrations for the 2018 book Chance Particulars: A Writer’s Field Notebook, by Sara Mansfield Taber, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. She has completed many official and family portrait commissions. 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.
-Richard Barnfield (1574-1620)
Elizabethan poet Richard Barnfield’s sonnet “If music and sweet poetry agree,” highlights the harmonious bond between two seemingly separate art forms, music and poetry. In the spirit of the poem, 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, and an enthusiast 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 times, and weave together symbols in compositions reminiscent of polyphonic music.
Trained in academic painting techniques, Maud Taber-Thomas’s artistic process is strongly tied to the methods 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 Taber-Thomas 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 Taber-Thomas’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.
Oil on Canvas, 20×24″, 2019
Director of the Montgomery County Public Libraries
Oil on Canvas, 30×40″, 2016
Oil on Panel, 12×16″, 2016
