The Studio is a charming portrait of an artist and his family at Christmas. Bellows paints his wife, Emma, in the foreground while the couple’s two daughters, Jean and Anne, play under the decorated tree. In the background, Emma’s mother makes a telephone call (a modern convenience) with the help of a servant. Up on the mezzanine, lithographer Bolton Brown is hard at work on Bellows’s printing press.

In The Studio, Bellows takes a modern approach to the time-honored theme of domestic life. Here, he experimented with compositions and color based on techniques used by modern artists Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso. The outline of his wife on the canvas at left, for example, features asymmetrical divisions suggesting a modern design.