An important early advertising photographer and editor of a pictorialist publication, Watkins was also a teacher at the Clarence H. White School of Photography for over a decade, nurturing important students like Margaret Bourke-White, Laura Gilpin, Paul Outerbridge, and Doris Ulmann. Although this image, sometimes called Domestic Symphony, retains the soft and shallow focus of her pictorialist training, it is a key example of Watkins’s pioneering modernist still lifes. Like contemporaneous work by Outerbridge and Paul Strand, the virtuosic composition revels in texture (slightly rumpled fabric, smooth porcelain, pocked stone); shade (pure-white porcelain, black shadows, a triad of colored eggs); and form (the gentle curves of the eggs echoed in the basin and the towel). A 1921 article in Vanity Fair compared this image to modernist sculpture by Constantin Brâncuși.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)