This is Afternoon Tea, painted in 1912 by the American artist Charles Bittinger (1879-1970). I found it on my favorite site for such things, Old Painting. I'd never heard of him but apparently he applied scientific techniques to art, including, in WW1, experimenting, says Wikipedia,
with the camouflage-related use of colored filters, and with using colored lights to conceal aspects of a scene. According to an article in a popular magazine in 1921, he “painted an airplane wing with the German cross upon it, which when viewed by our [U.S.] army through binoculars equipped with a red filter, discloses itself to be not the German cross, but the red, white and blue of the Allies. Thus an airplane could fly unscathed over the German lines and return home again without being fired upon”.
Clever. But I just liked the painting, and liked it even more because the pretty lady reminded me very much of Lady Loxley in Mr Selfridge, to which I am addicted. She's played, of course, by the beautiful Katherine Kelly.
