Tea Time (Metzinger)

Tea Time (French: Le Goûter, also known as Femme à la Cuillère or Woman with a teaspoon) is an oil painting created in 1911 by the French artist and theorist Jean Metzinger. It was exhibited in Paris at the Salon d'Automne of 1911, and the Salon de la Section d'Or, 1912.

The painting was first reproduced (illustrated) in Chroniques Médico-Artistique, Le Sabotage Anatomique au Salon d'Automne (1911). The following year it was reproduced in Du "Cubisme", by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes (1912). In 1913 it was published in The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations (Les Peintres Cubistes) by Guillaume Apollinaire. The painting was subsequently published in Arthur Jerome Eddy's Cubists and Post-impressionism, 1914, titled The Taster.

Art critic Louis Vauxcelles in a literary newspaper Gil Blas, 30 September 1911, referred to Le goûter sarcastically as "la Joconde à la cuiller" (Mona Lisa with a spoon).

André Salmon dubbed this painting "La Joconde du Cubisme" ("La Joconde Cubiste"), "The Mona Lisa of Cubism" ("Mona Lisa with a teaspoon"). Tea Time "was far more famous than any painting that Picasso and Braque had made up until this time", according to curator Michael Taylor (Philadelphia Museum of Art), "because Picasso and Braque, by not showing at the Salons, have actually removed themselves from the public... For most people, the idea of Cubism was actually associated with an artist like Metzinger, far more than Picasso." (Taylor, 2010)

Le Goûter forms part of the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art.