The faceting of the rest of her body, to some extent, coincides with actual muscular and skeletal features (collar bone, ribcage, pectorals, deltoids, neck tissue).

Unidentified elements are composed of alternating angular structures, The colors employed by Metzinger are subdued, mixed (either on a palette or directly on the surface), with an overall natural allure.

"This interplay of visual, tactile, and motor spaces is fully operative in Metzinger's Le Gouter of 1911", write Antliff and Leighten, "an image of an artist's model, semi-nude, with a cloth draped over her right arm as she takes a break between sessions [...] her right hand delicately suspends the spoon between cup and mouth."

The painting becomes a product of experience, memory and imagination, evoking a complex series of mind-associations between past present and future, between tactile and olfactory sensations (taste and touch), between the physical and metaphysical.

"Not only was this painting more unequivocally classical in its pedigree (and recognized as such by critics who instantly dubbed it 'La Joconde cubiste') than any of its now relatively distant sources in Picasso's oeuvre," writes David Cottington, "but in its clear if tacit juxtaposition, remarked on by Green and others, of sensation and idea—taste and geometry—it exemplified the interpretation of innovations from both wings of the cubist movement that Metzinger was offering in his essays of the time, as well as the paradigm shift from a perceptual to a conceptual painting that he recognized as now common to them.

"[10] The quiet atmosphere of Tea Time "seduces by means of the bridge it creates between two periods", according to Eimert and Podksik, "although Metzinger's style had already passed through an analytical phase, it now concentrated more on the idea of reconciling modernity with classical subjects".

[11] A preparatory drawing for Tea Time (Etude pour 'Le Goûter'), 19 x 15 cm, is conserved in Paris at the Musée National d'Art Moderne – Centre Georges Pompidou.

In his 1912 Anecdotal History of Cubism André Salmon writes: Jean Metzinger and Robert Delaunay painted landscapes planted with cottages reduced to the severe appearance of parallelepipeds.

Living less of an interior life than Picasso, remaining to all outward appearances more like painters than their precursor, these young artists were in a much greater hurry for results, though they be less complete.

In accord with this view of pictorial space, Metzinger and Gleizes encouraged artists to discard classical perspective and replace it with creative intuition.

Antliff and Leighten continue, "As we have seen Metzinger celebrated this faculty in Le Gouter, and Apollinaire advised artists to rely on their 'intuition' in The Cubist Painters (1913).

[24] A page from the periodical Fantasio, 15 October 1911, by Roland Dorgelès, features Portrait de Jacques Nayral by Albert Gleizes (1911) and Le goûter (Tea Time) by Jean Metzinger, juxtaposed with images of unidentified models, the man with his knees crossed and a book on his lap, the woman (clothed) holding a spoon and a tea cup, as if the sitters.

The artist became to a large extent free, libre, to place lines, shapes, forms and colors onto the painting according to his or her own creative intuition.

[30] Along with Metzinger's Tea Time, Gleizes' Portrait de Jacques Nayral, painted the same year, exemplifies ideas and opinions formulated between 1910 and 1911 that would soon be codified in Du "Cubisme" (1912).

Nayral's related interest in avant-garde art led him to purchase Metzinger's large 1912 oil on canvas entitled La Femme au Cheval, also known as Woman with a Horse (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen).

[9] The following edition of Fantasio (1 November 1911) began with "A Consultation at the Salon d'Automne" by Roland Catenoy; a suppository report of a walk around the Grand Palais accompanied by two medical men who offer their 'diagnosis' of the paintings on display.

A climax is attained in the presence of Metzinger's Le goûter: a "cubisticall nude woman" who presents all the symptoms of "lithopocdion", otherwise only previously seen in petrified fetuses; she is beyond treatment and close to death.

Just as Louis Vauxcelles made the Cubists' repudiation of "current vision" (appearances in nature) the crux of his attacks, so most of the jokes in the press at the expense of Cubism centered on the question of likeness.

"[32] Guillaume Apollinaire reviewing the Cubist room at the Salon d'Automne of 1911 (in L'Intransigeant) writes: 'Gleizes shows us the two sides of his great talent: invention and observation.

'[33] In his memoirs, Albert Gleizes writes of the structure of Tea Time: 'The construction of his painting turns on the orchestration of these geometrical volumes, which shift their position, develop, interweave following the movements in space of the painter himself.

(Albert Gleizes)[34]Peter Brooke writes of Metzinger's Tea-Time: "The whole is inscribed in a beautifully constructed armature of straight lines and curves whose relation to each other is not determined by the figuration (the woman enjoying her tea) but interweaves with it in a manner that is entirely intelligible.

[37] Christopher Green writes that the "deformations of lines" allowed by mobile perspective in the head of Metzinger's Tea-time and Gleizes's Jacques Nayral "have seemed tentative to historians of Cubism.

Such 'intelligent' knowledge, writes Green, "was the accumulation of an all-round study of things, and so it was conveyed by the combination of multiple viewpoints in a single image."

"The cubists play a role in art today analogous to that sustained so effectively in the political and social arena by the apostles of anti-militarism and organized sabotage" wrote the critic Gabriel Mourney in his review of the Salon d'Automne of 1911 for Le Journal, "so doubtless the excesses of the anarchists and saboteurs of French painting will contribute to reviving, in artists and amateurs worthy of the name, the taste for true art and true beauty.

'[10][39] Vauxcelles, perhaps more so than his fellow critics, indulged in witty mockery of the salon Cubists: 'But in truth, what honor we do to these bipeds of the parallelepiped, to their lucubrations, cubes, succubi and incubi'.

His comfort level had already been surpassed with the 1907 works of Matisse and Derain, which he perceived as perilous, 'an uncertain schematization, proscribing relief and volumes in the name of I know not what principle of pictorial abstraction.

We'll not join them ...'[10][39] A medical doctor, author of an article in Chroniques Médico-Artistique, Le Sabotage Anatomique au Salon d'Automne, Paris, 1911, writes: Believe for a moment with certain advocates of Cubism whose good faith would be worse than the posturing [roublardise], that this is an excellent workshop exercise; when these gentlemen have finished their stretching [assouplissements], then show us the result; it is with this hope that we can cast an eye on Le Goûter of M. Metzinger; when this eruption of cobblestones [pavés] will have been forgotten [passée] thanks to a harsh winter and to a good destructive fire, perhaps will we have one more talented painter!

[2]In Room 7 and 8 of the 1911 Salon d'Automne, held 1 October through November 8, at the Grand Palais in Paris, hung works by Metzinger (Le goûter), Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, Albert Gleizes, Roger de La Fresnaye, André Lhote, Jacques Villon, Marcel Duchamp, František Kupka, Alexander Archipenko, Joseph Csaky and Francis Picabia.

The first was the organized group showing by Cubists in Salle 41 of the 1911 Salon des Indépendants (Paris), with Metzinger, Delaunay, le Fauconnier and Léger.

The exuberant eagerness and vitality of their region, consisting of two room remotely situated, was a complete contrast to the morgue I was compelled to pass through in order to reach it.