William Paxton was born in Baltimore in 1869, but, following his family’s move to New England in his childhood, he lived and worked in greater Boston for the rest of his life. He was instrumental in the formulation of the Boston impressionist mode, establishing, along with Edmund Tarbell a highly-polished technique centering for motif on sophisticated women at leisure. Paxton’s contribution is echoed and affirmed in the work of colleagues Joseph De Camp (1858-1923) and Frank W. Benson (1862-1951). Like several of his peers in the Boston school, he studied in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme, at École des Beaux-Arts and at Académie Julian. Stateside, he also studied with the brilliant Dennis Miller Bunker in the 1880s. Much of his work, especially from the 1910s on, is sharply executed, in a vein that scholar William Gerdts traces to Tarbell’s admiration of the Dutch master Jan Vermeer. Paxton only increased his efforts toward these glassy, varnished surfaces as his career progressed, in contrast to many of his peers, who loosened and relaxed their idealized realism in the early twentieth century. Paxton’s early work is more emphatically impressionist, using brilliant outdoor daylight in a manner similar to Frank Benson. Paxton’s celebrated 1902 work, The White Veranda is radiant with this light and a broken stroke.