The Open Door is perhaps the most overt example of McNicoll’s discomfort with the traditional discourse of bourgeois femininity. Painted in the same year as her election to the prestigious Royal Society of British Artists, the image contains signs that indicate the artist’s unease with domesticity, notably the door leading to the outside world, the strangeness of the mirror that doesn’t reflect anything, the uncertainty of what the woman is sewing, and the peculiarity of the woman’s pose.