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In his book “Absorption and Theatricality,” Michael Fried advances an interpretation of French painting from the middle of the eighteenth century, that centers on its unusual consistency of representation: figures depicted as being absorbed in a certain activity and oblivious to all else (including the beholder's presence before the painting). The roots of this visual trope can be seen in the work of earlier painters such as the Dutch Baroque Period painter Vermeer’s domestic interior scenes and their articulation of subjects engaged in and, indeed, absorbed by, a simple task such as pouring water from a pitcher.  As Fried points out, when in the presence of these images, we the viewers become absorbed in the absorption of the depicted subject. Painters such as Vermeer, Chardin and Greuze found in the absorption of their figures both a natural correlative for their own engrossment in the act of painting, but also a prolep­tic mirroring of what they trusted would be the absorption of the beholder (us) before the finished works.  These portraits seek to similarly frame, isolate and radically extend the subject’s absorption and related action (with all of its plentitude and density) using a zone of stretched time.