Half Guilty Wife, Women's Home Companion illustration, April 1953 1953

Robert Harris made this illustration, Half Guilty Wife, in 1953 for Women's Home Companion. It has that mid-century ad-man quality, but the colour palette is what's interesting to me, those weird, clashing greens and reds. It's kind of unsettling, but also so of its time. There's a tension in the painting, a narrative, and a lot of it comes from the way Harris uses colour and texture to create this sense of unease. The woman's black dress is so smooth, so sleek, but then you have the rough texture of the stone wall behind them, or the cowhide chair, which feels like a different world altogether. Look at the man's hand holding the cigarette, the way the smoke curls up – it's such a small detail, but it adds to the drama. Harris reminds me a little of someone like Richard Prince, who also played with these kinds of archetypes and narratives. But ultimately, it's the ambiguity of the image that makes it so compelling. What are they looking at? What's going on between them? It's up to us to fill in the blanks.