Rose Wylie

Rose Wylie did not sketch her initial visual impression for this painting, making it one of the rare instances in which she painted directly from memory onto the canvas. She drew inspiration from her own breakfast plate, with its striking blue detail. In her characteristic style, she renders the food in impasto brushstrokes. Despite the large scale of the painting, the artist maintains a sense of abstraction. In fact, it could just as well be an abstract composition if not for the title Breakfast, which suggests this is a plate of food.

As in many of her compositions, a word on the canvas reveals the artist’s original source. Wylie, however, understands the individual letters as part of the composition as well. She is more concerned with the shapes of the letters than the meaning of the word. As a result, the spelling or the spacing between letters is often unconventional. Wylie prioritizes the formal function of the letters within the composition as opposed to legibility.

You may wonder why Wylie painted this work across two separate panels. There is a practical explanation: The artist’s studio is on the second floor of her old farmhouse and can only be reached by a small staircase. Since Wylie needs to be able to carry the work down the stairs, and the small studio has a low ceiling, the size of the canvas is limited. To create larger works, she combines multiple canvases. They are then sewn onto another canvas that is mounted to a stretcher frame in a second studio on the ground floor.