As far as I can tell, the JTextPane always insists on drawing on a solid colored background (set via setBackground()). This is fine, no doubt, when the field is placed on a plain background for display or editing. But, when used via the SwingUtils.paintComponent() method, this becomes a hinderance, because it is impossible to place the text over arbitrary backgrounds (which may be precisely the intent of using SwingUtils.paintComponent()). This limitation should be removed.