This Little Pig Went to Market

Artist Lilly Martin Spencer (American, 1822 - 1902)

Date1857

MediumOil on cut arched board

Dimensions16 x 11 7/8 in. (23 1/2 x 19 1/2 x 2 1/2 in. framed)

ClassificationsOil Painting

Credit LineCharles F. Smith Fund

Terms

Object number1994.18

DescriptionSpencer's art has been celebrated and maligned since her early days as a painter, in the 1840s. As fashions in art changed, her genre paintings were attacked as, variously, heavily sentimental, stiffly Victorian, and weak in their feminist stance. Yet Spencer was one of the most popular genre painters in antebellum America. Although her paintings did not fare well in the post-Civil War art market, she continued to make a living as an artist until her death in 1902. Today, she is seen as both a conservative and a radical. She stuck with safe themes of domesticity for the most part but dealt with them in unique ways, distinguishing her from the male genre painters of her day. Her work is "self-opposing," (1)possessing contradictions born of the need to survive and make a living while preserving one's own voice.
This Little Pig Went to Market illustrates Spencer's ability to be both pleasing and provoking. A happy baby sits enthroned on the lap of his lovely mother, who plays out the nursery rhyme on his little toes. The nursery has opulent furnishings, with a gold-topped curtained cradle, a gold-figured tablecloth, and a large patterned rug on the floor. The entire image is enshrined in a curved frame as if it were a Raphael Madonna.
While many nineteenth-century genre images extol the (boy) child over the attending parent, Spencer's attention falls as much on the mother as on the child. Her rich green dressing gown has deep borders of an Oriental design and a lining of rose-colored silk. Beneath it a sparkling white lace nightgown spreads across her elegantly beribboned velvet slipper. She is absorbed in her child; we are absorbed in her. The seeming wealth of the painting led a reviewer to interpret the subject as Empress Eugénie of France and the Prince Imperial, a subject completely incompatible with Spencer's solidly middle-class domestic imagery. (2) More likely, Spencer and her son Charles are the models, and the details are elaborations on their own more modest circumstances. (3)
It is typical of Spencer to focus on the mother. Many of her genre paintings feature women in their familiar spaces. Rather than displaying them decoratively with the furniture in the parlor, Spencer shows active women in the kitchen ("Shake Hands?" 1854; Ohio Historical Center, Columbus), preparing food ("Kiss Me and You'll Kiss the Lasses," 1856; Brooklyn Museum of Art), reading newspapers in the midst of the hubbub of daily life ("War Spirit at Home," 1866; Newark Museum, N.J.), or performing child-care chores ("Beauty and Barbarism" and "Beauty Barbarized" both ca. 1890; private collection). Real women take care of real life in paintings by this woman artist. Even the spruced up mother in This Little Pig Went to Market sits with her child in the personal space of a nursery and not in a more formal public parlor.
Spencer's work, then, is closer in flavor to seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings than to Italian Madonnas. For instance, Gerrit Dou's The Young Mother (ca.1660; Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin-Dahlem) shows a well dressed mother with a baby on her lap and a young child at her elbow. Behind them is a canopy bed with a curtain pulled back, reminiscent of the curtained cradle in Spencer's painting. And, like Spencer's, the entire image rests harmoniously under a curved arch. Although it is unlikely that Spencer ever saw Dou's painting, Dutch works were well known in the United States by the mid-nineteenth century and she surely saw a number of examples in Nicholas Longworth's collection in Cincinnati. (4) In Spencer's work and in Dutch genre painting, acts of daily life have a simple sacramental yet warmly humorous tone that well suited a largely middle-class audience.
The New Britain version of This Little Pig Went to Market is one of two known copies of the now-lost original. The dimensions of the original painting are known to have been twenty-four by twenty inches, which does not match the dimensions of the New Britain painting or the better-known version at the Campus Martius Museum in Spencer's hometown, Marietta, Ohio. (5) The two versions are virtually identical and attest to the popularity of the original painting: it appears that Spencer received commissions to make both copies (a frequent, and lucrative, nineteenth-century practice). In addition, the image was reproduced as an engraving in 1859 for the Cosmopolitan Art Association. Most modern reproductions replicate the Campus Martius version.

LW
Bibliography:

Lilly Martin Spencer Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; M. B. Cowdrey, "Lilly Martin Spencer, 1822-1902: Painter of the American Sentimental Scene," American Collector 13 (August 1944): 6-7, 14, 19; E. S. Reiter, "Lily Martin Spencer," Museum Echoes 27 (May 1954): 35-38; Robin Bolton-Smith and William H. Truettner, Lilly Martin Spencer (1822-1902): The Joys of Sentiment (Washington, D.C.: National Collection of Fine Arts, 1973); Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting: The Poli
tics of Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); David M. Lubin, Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

Notes:
1. Lubin, "Picturing a Nation," pp. 162-63.
2. Reiter, "Lilly Martin Spencer," p. 37.
3. Bolton-Smith and Truettner, "Lilly Martin Spencer," p. 169.
4. Ibid., pp. 16-17.
5. In 1973 Bolton-Smith and Truettner (ibid, pp. 169-70) note the existence of the Campus Martius copy but not of the New Britain version, evidently unknown at the time.

On View

On view

Collections