Isabel Bishop was part of a loosely knit group of artists that included Reginald Marsh. Known as the Fourteenth Street School, they sought to capture contemporary life in New York City in the 1930s and '40s. Bishop is primarily associated with studies of young women caught during idle moments away from their jobs. She spent more than ten years painting the secretaries, sales clerks, and blue-collar workers who lived or worked around Union Square. Her favorite subject was women going about their everyday lives, eating, talking, putting on makeup, taking off their coats. These ordinary motions produced facial expressions that Bishop felt revealed the personality of the people she portrayed.
In Tidying Up, a woman, perhaps a secretary or salesperson, uses a pocket mirror to check her teeth for lipstick smudges. Bishop saw such women as participants in an American tradition of upward mobility, and she used active brushwork and a sense of the figure's physical movement as metaphors for this social advancement. Bishop's sepia tones achieve a transparency that results in a sense of vibration and thus of motion. At the same time, the warm brown recalls old master drawings of the Italian Renaissance, a taste that Bishop shared with her teacher, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and with Marsh.
It's a moment in [the women's] lives when they are really in motion, because they, of course, are looking for husbands and, at the same time, they're earning their living.
-Isabel Bishop, 1957
