Eight women and children fill this room with raucous laughter, dancing and celebration. It is a party that appears wildly out of control–one figure holds a round cartoon-like bomb, its wick lit and smoking. Another holds a mirror up and grimaces towards the viewer, tongue out like a Gorgon warding away the evil eye. June Leaf based this painting on a print of an 18 th century French painting showing a genteel gathering in a fancy room. She upturned civility to allow for this rambunctious soiree in which anything might happen.
Leaf spent a summer in Paris copying old master paintings at the Louvre as a young woman. Her understanding of the conventions of genre painting has allowed her to satirize it here.
