A young woman with pale skin, dressed in a black and white servant’s uniform, stands reading a book behind a collection of urns, a figurine, and a stationary box arrayed on a tabletop in this vertical painting. Seen from about the hips up, the woman faces our left in profile as she gazes down at the open book in her hands. She has a turned up nose, smooth skin, and her lips are slightly parted over a rounded chin. Her blond hair is pulled up in a bun, and she wears a black dress with a wide, white collar and a white apron tied around her waist. A feather duster with a black handle is tucked under her left arm, closer to us, so the dark feathers fan out behind her.
   She stands in the corner of a room with light tan walls. Between us and the woman and running parallel to the bottom edge of the canvas, a wooden gaming table inlaid with a black and white checkerboard pattern on its top holds five objects. To our left, the hinged lid of a white rectangular box has been opened to reveal white note cards and envelopes. The inside of the box lid is painted cobalt blue. Next to the box is a white ceramic jar with a rounded body and a flat, dark lid. At the middle of the table and a little closer to us, a brown vase with a tall, inward curving neck sits next to a figurine of a person wearing a blue and pink kimono. Lastly, a white lidded jar painted in blue with a person and a landscape sits to our right. The artist signed and dated the painting in dark, capital letters near the upper left corner: “PAXTON” and “1910.”

百度翻译：http://fanyi.baidu.com

   William McGregor Paxton, along with his Boston School colleagues Edmund Tarbell, Frank Benson, and Joseph DeCamp, achieved institutional recognition and popular acclaim for paintings based on a single theme: a refined interior inhabited by a young woman as decorative as the still-life objects that surround her. The House Maid depicts a uniformed servant engrossed in a book and standing behind a table on which a group of still-life objects is displayed.

   With the exception of the open stationery box on the far left, most of the items represented in The House Maid are East Asian: a white Chinese lidded jar, a vessel, a porcelain figure, and a Qing dynasty blue-and-white porcelain pot. All are reminders of New England's long history of trade with Asia.

   The juxtaposition of Asian objects and a lovely woman was a typical motif in American turn-of-the-century painting. Reading was likewise a familiar and repeated subject: Paxton was unusual, however, in representing a servant rather than the usual lady of leisure. The items on the table are the housemaid's responsibility but are not her property.

   Along with other members of the Boston School, Paxton was known to admire the paintings of Johannes Vermeer. In The House Maid, the stable triangular composition, muted palette, precisely rendered textures, meticulous arrangement, and sense of quiet absorption all have parallels in Vermeer's work.

百度翻译：http://fanyi.baidu.com