Lilly Martin Spencer - Artistic Style

Artistic Style

Lilly Martin Spencer's paintings are generally oil on canvas, ranging in sizes from as big as 72"x50" to as small as 16"x11". Her themes were drawn from close to home often depicting idealized children, Madonna-like mothers, happy housewives, and loveable inept husbands. Her work has been considered “both ideological (encouraging accommodation to norms associated with the rising middle class) and utopian (resistant to class or gender domination). She was often influenced by etiquette books, which resulted in attention to details in the settings such as bowls of fruits and neatly designed flower arrangements. Etiquette also affected the activities of the picture's subjects—women were engaged in womanly activities and everyone played their proper roles. Painted in a palette of bright, crisp colors, her canvases are refined in execution and smoothly finished, although in later years her brushstrokes became drier and looser. Her works were usually given short, catchy titles, undescriptive, but rather exclamations on the subject of the painting.

One main critique of her work is the variation in the size of the heads of her figures. Her reviewers often comment that the head is larger and disproportionate to the body size of the figures. Such pieces as Shake Hands? (1854), an oil on canvas with arched top, which now resides at the Ohio Historical Society, epitomizes Spencer’s unique style. The piece shows a buxom woman making dough in a homey kitchen adorned with domestic accommodations, such as a bowl of apples, and a chicken. Her skirt is tied back, presumably to keep it clean. Pausing from her activity, and smiling broadly, the doughy-handed woman reaches out to greet a visitor, seemingly the viewer. The title demonstrates Spencer's standard wit: shaking hands is the last thing someone would want to do while working with dough. It also has a deeper meaning about equality. Shaking hands is a symbol of male equality and was “fundamental to males citizens’ sense of status." Here a woman is making her claim to equality, though it is a limited equality rooted in a domestic sphere. Spencer does make the women's sphere separate. The dark spaces make the room appear closed off separating the women’s sphere from the more public male sphere. However it is not necessary a negative message, this painting shows a Utopian kitchen. The message is that a woman in her sphere “accommodates the status quo and attempts to invest it with new meaning."

Women were not merely frivolous and vain; rather they worked in domestic labor, which was not merely useful but highly enjoyable. The woman here is self-confident, smiles and even appears to flirt with viewer. She directs the kitchen and is in control of her world, however limited it might be. Spencer plays with traditional notions of women's roles in society and domesticity and infuses them with deeper meaning.