femme-de-lettres:

Large (Clark Art Museum)

Harry Wilson Watrous painted this, The Chatterers, in 1913.

The Metropolitan Museum writes of Watrous, “About 1905 the artist’s eyesight began to fail, and he shifted from exquisitely rendered, tiny genre scenes recalling seventeenth-century Dutch paintings to larger canvases containing idealized female figures.”

There certainly is something ideal in the work, with the well-dressed woman gazing at a crow, apparently sitting up from where she has been reclining on a bench.

There is also something slightly surreal, however, to the odd unity of the scene: birds of all sorts fly hither and thither across the wallpaper while a woman in black, iridescent black feathers in her hair and on her shoulder, gazes calmly at a crow that (one would expect) better belongs outdoors.