Her Canvas

Women artists · across history & the world

This Little Pig Went to Market, c. 1857, by Lilly Martin Spencer. Oil on canvas. From the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

United States · 1822–1902

Lilly Martin Spencer

Painter of warm, comic domestic scenes widely reproduced as prints.

  • Intimate
  • Vibrant
  • Labor & Domesticity

Fun fact

She was the family's main breadwinner, supporting her husband and thirteen children with her brush.

How she made it

Genre oil painting made from posed family models in her own kitchen, with strong local colour and crisply painted still-life detail. Many canvases were made with chromolithographic reproduction in mind.

Work
This Little Pig Went to Market, c. 1857
Medium
Oil on canvas
Collection
Arts of the Americas, Art Institute of Chicago
View this work

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