About this work
*Plate of Milk* is an oil on canvas measuring 23½ × 14½ inches , its tall, narrow format lending the composition an intimate, almost vignette-like quality. At its centre stands a woman — Icart's eternal muse — caught in a moment of tender domesticity, setting down a plate of milk for cats gathered at her feet. Icart's depictions of women were mostly sensual and full of hinted sexuality, with beautiful figures rendered amid expressions of passion or surprise — and horses, dogs, or cats were often part of the scene. Here, the animals ground the image in warmth and ease rather than drama. The palette is everything: executed in warm reds, golds, and yellows , the composition glows from within, the figure thrown into bright relief against a deeper, enveloping background that makes the scene feel both intimate and theatrical.
Produced circa 1920 and signed in the bottom left corner, this piece belongs to what collectors and scholars call Icart's Red Period.
Known also as the "Era of the Golden Palette," this phase saw Icart working in a richly saturated, warm-toned register markedly different from the delicate hand-coloured etchings for which he was celebrated. Unlike his etchings, which are commercial in nature, Icart's paintings represent his personal interpretation of his world — a style that gave homage to the 18th-century French masters Watteau and Fragonard, as well as to the Impressionists Degas and Monet.
In 1920, Icart exhibited at the Paris Simonson Gallery , and *Plate of Milk* sits squarely in this period of serious painterly ambition — a time when he was pushing beyond the etching press and asserting himself in oil on canvas.
This is a painting that rewards a quiet room. Its vertical format and glowing warmth make it a natural anchor for a study, a reading corner, or an intimate dining space — somewhere candlelight already lives. Icart's art depicted the sensuous, glamorous, and even erotic Parisian woman with a tinge of humour , but *Plate of Milk* turns that sens
