Afternoon Tea

Jean-François Rafaëlli · c. 1880

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

34.9 × 28.6 cm (13 3/4 × 11 1/4 in.); Framed: 42.6 × 38.1 × 6.4 cm (16 3/4 × 15 × 2 1/2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Realism

Afternoon Tea by Jean-François Rafaëlli is a quietly intimate work that captures the unhurried rhythms of bourgeois Parisian life with the eye of a committed observer rather than a flatterer. Rafaëlli occupies an unusual position in late nineteenth-century French painting. Though associated with the Naturalist movement, Degas personally invited him to exhibit alongside the Impressionists in 1880 and 1881 — a rare endorsement that reflects how seriously his peers regarded his ability to render everyday scenes with psychological honesty. His technique favoured a muted, considered palette and careful attention to light falling across domestic interiors, giving his figures a sense of weight and stillness that sets him apart from the more animated surfaces of his contemporaries. Rafaëlli was also a noted printmaker and illustrator, and that draughtsman's instinct for precise observation carries through into his painted work, lending each canvas a clarity of detail that rewards close looking. Held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, the original remains inaccessible to most. This hand-painted oil reproduction is made by a skilled artist working directly from the source, matching the original's scale, palette, and brushwork so that what you receive is a painting — not a print — with all the texture and warmth the medium demands.