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Peeling Onions is an oil painting by American genre painter Lilly Martin Spencer in 1852. Spencer is recognized for her ability to convey the nuance in domestic life with contextual and narrative details. Though the composition of the woman in the middle is familiar in most formal portraits, the meticulous depiction of the foreground still life and the background space symbolizes this painting, which gains her popularity.[1]
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Description
editPeeling Onions is an oil painting on canvas measuring 36 by 29 inches. It depicts a woman peeling onions in the kitchen, a daily domestic task. Yet her pensive facial expression, hesitating gesture, and blue dress with sewing pins suggest an implicit and deeper concern about her identity, emotional depth, and complexity.[1]
The attention paid to details in the work reflect Spencer's proficient skill of Düsseldorf realism that prevailed in the United States. The still life in the front presents to the viewer with a sharp glimpse of naturalism, and trompe l'oeil effects bring by the protruding spoon indicate painter's study of seventeenth-century Dutch art.[1]
Spencer approached the scene from both sides. The gentle weep of the woman plays a parody of the tender sensibility of females during her time, while in contrast, the rolled sleeves showed her forearms muscular with power.[1]
Background
editThe American genre art painter Lilly Martin Spencer is a widely recognized female artist grew up in Ohio.[1] At the time, paintings on domestic life is popular among artists and the public, but the dilemma still presents for female artists. Angelique Martin, the mother of Lilly Martin Spencer, is the daughter of a French-immigrant family who holds progressive attitude towards her daughter's education and vocation.[1] Spencer had successively moved to Cincinnati and New York, and this step helped her significantly in studying painting techniques and facilitated her to sell works. She later traveled to Europe and gets inspired by high surface finish realism works with delicate depiction of details in Düsseldorf Gallery, German.[1]
Lilly Martin Spencer soon became the sole provider of the family as her husband started to support her as the business manager. And she finds it tough to balance her role as an artist, the housewife, and the mother. Her experience echoed her works in blending the vulnerability and work. Her works recognized by the New York art world through this peculiar approach in the later quarter of the nineteenth-century when female role in the society gets restricted and indistinct.[1]
Analysis
editThe art critic Elizabeth L. O’Leary has pointed out there's something contained beyond the portrait of the woman. By depicting her crying while fulfilling her domestic life, it not only revealed the growth in the awareness of female equality in country's public and professional life, but also how it presents as a challenge to their traditional role in family.[1]
She also noted the woman in the painting is a portrait of the artist's own maid. From surviving letters of the artist, the message contained indicating these domestic employees during her early years in New York as companionable. They helped her temporarily freed from daily chores so she can work on her paintings, and became the subject of her composition.[1]
In the later nineteenth-century, the concept of "woman's sphere" gets prevail in popular literature. It equated woman with home and private life with man. Peeling Onions, however, challenged this idea under the female painter's work that though woman in the painting showed vulnerability in her cry, her hands keep on fulfilling the work determined, showed the resolution and power of female labor.[1]