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 highlights this painting, which gained her popularity.[1]
Peeling Onions is oil on canvas measuring 36 by 29 inches. It depicts a woman peeling onions in the kitchen. Hpensive facial expression, hesitating gesture, and blue dress with sewing pins suggest an implicit and deeper concern about her identity, emotional depth, and complexity.
This attention to details reflect Spencer's use of Düsseldorf realism then prevailing in the United States. The still life in the front presents a sharp glimpse of naturalism, and trompe l'oeil effects with the protruding spoon indicate the artist's study of seventeenth-century Dutch art.
Spencer approached the scene from both sides. The woman's gentle weeping depicts the tender sensibility of females during her time, while in contrast, the rolled sleeves revealed her muscular forearms .
Spencer grew up in Ohio. At the time, paintings on domestic life were popular, but female artists faced many difficulties. Angelique Martin, her mother, was the daughter of a French-immigrant family who held progressive attitude towards her daughter's education and vocation. Spencer successively moved to Cincinnati and New York, helping her study painting techniques and helped her to sell her work. She later traveled to Europe where she was inspired by high surface finish realism works with delicate depiction of details in Düsseldorf Gallery, Germany.
She soon became the sole provider of her family as her husband started to support her as business manager. She found it difficult to balance her role as artist, housewife, and mother. Her experience echoed her works in blending vulnerability and work. Her works were recognized in the New York art world through her peculiar approach in the final quarter of the nineteenth-century, when female roles in society became restricted and indistinct.
Art critic Elizabeth L. O’Leary pointed out something beyond the portrait. By depicting her crying while fulfilling her domestic life, she revealed the growth in awareness of female inequality, and also how it challenges their traditional role in family. She noted the subject is the artist's own maid. From surviving letters of the artist, she perceived these domestic employees during her early years in New York as companionable. They helped her temporarily free herself from daily chores to work on her paintings.
In the later nineteenth-century, the concept of "woman's sphere" prevailed in popular literature. It equated woman with home and private life with man. Peeling Onions, challenged this ideal showing that while woman in the painting showed vulnerability in her tears, her hands kept on fulfilling the work determined, showing the determination and power of female labor.