The Reason Dinner Was Late

A portly, walrus-mustached policeman sits stiffly at a kitchen table, hat off, enduring his portrait. Opposite him, a young housemaid perches on a straight-backed chair, sketch-board propped before her, pencil in hand—absorbed in the sitting rather than her duties. Behind her, three other servants crowd and crane: a stout cook in apron, a taller woman in street dress, and a small child, all watching with mingled amusement and complicity. The dining-room table beyond presumably sits unset. Gibson's joke is gendered and class-conscious: female domestics neglect their employer's dinner to indulge an artistic whim, the policeman trading authority for vanity. The figures appear to be working-class Irish-immigrant stock, a common Gibson social milieu, their below-stairs world rendered as a familiar subject of Life's Edwardian illustrations.