The Well Traveled Man, also known as The Expansionist

Description

Following extensive travel in Asia, Francis Millet painted this ambitious work. A couple in historical dress occupy a room filled with exotic souvenirs—Indonesian puppets, Javanese dolls, Japanese books, and other curiosities—that Millet based on his own collection. He also modeled the setting after the parlor of a sixteenth-century house where he had lived in England. Despite these autobiographical elements, the figures are dressed in eighteenth-century costume, and the mood of the work, with its soft natural light and exquisite still-life, recalls seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting.