La Fileuse, the Spinner, belongs to Waterhouse's earliest public years. He painted it in 1874, when he was about twenty-four, and exhibited it at the Royal Society of British Artists in the spring of that year. It is an oil on canvas of just 32 by 25.5 cm, barely larger than a sheet of notebook paper, and it is in a private collection.
A woman at the threshold
A young woman in a yellow gown with a blue shawl over her arm pauses at the opening of a shadowed classical room. She holds the fibre and spindle of hand-spinning, wears a necklace of pale blue beads, and steps barefoot out of the dark and into the light. A black Greek vase stands at the lower left. Everything is staged to look like a Roman or Greek house, even though the figure is placed so close to the front of the canvas that she almost steps out of it.
Why spinners matter
Spinning was the classic image of the virtuous woman in the ancient world, from Penelope at her loom to the Fates spinning the thread of life. Waterhouse returned to the theme throughout his career: a Neapolitan flax spinner followed in 1877, and spinning gear appears again in his 1909 Thisbe.
Little-known facts
- Waterhouse was born in Rome in 1849, so the Mediterranean setting was part of his earliest memories.
- He was just starting out, and small pictures like this one were a practical way for a young painter to get noticed.
The Spinner appears on our: