The Spinners

Thomas Hart Benton’s The Spinners features two young women spinning wool into yarn using a spinning wheel and distaff, the weighted stick that helps twist fiber into yarn for making cloth. The women represent the colonial housewife, performing the role of domestic producer. Clad in simple dresses, the women inhabit a closed-in room with a grid-like patterning on the window reminiscent of a prison. In combination with the delicate glaze-like layers of paint, the atmosphere is one of somber melancholy.

The Spinners was originally created as part of Benton’s American Historical Epic series (1919–1928). Along with Slaves (TF 2003.4) it was to be one of five panels in Chapter II, which depicts the fraught economic history of America. Both paintings can be read as essays on inequality and the exploitation of laborers in the United States. Unlike Slaves, however, Benton never exhibited The Spinners alongside the other panels in the series. Although it is unknown why Benton ultimately chose to exclude The Spinners from his American Historical Epic series, scholars have posited that its intended placement at the center of the entire series positioned women—rather than contentious race relations—as the driving force of Benton’s revisionist history of early America. The painting’s exclusion instead placed the Terra Foundation's Slaves and Planting (private collection, New York) at the center, which emphasizes the most prominent theme of the series: the violent exploitation of Africans and Native Americans in America’s colonial history.

The Spinners is unique in that it is one of only a few panels in the Historical American Epic series to depict women, portrayed here as active participants rather than as passive witnesses to history as they appear in other panels. Painted in an era of mass-produced textiles, the spinning wheel represents women’s preindustrial contribution to the nation’s economy. The enduring visual cliché of the capable colonial housewife was perpetuated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s popular 1858 epic poem The Courtship of Miles Standish, set in the Plymouth Colony. In the eighth canto, “The Spinning Wheel,” Longfellow describes a romance between the Puritan maiden and her suitor, which captivated an American audience already invested in the mythology of spinning as the embodiment of harmony between labor and art in household craft.

American fascination with the spinning wheel was further ignited in 1864 with the recreation of a colonial New England kitchen at the U. S. Sanitary Fair in Brooklyn, a benefit for the Union Army during the Civil War. Later demonstrations at the 1876 Centennial Fair in Philadelphia and at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago contributed to the romanticization of the spinning wheel. This in turn reinforced the widely held vision of distinctly separate and gendered spheres of labor in the nineteenth century, with men occupying the industrial and agricultural arena while women’s work revolved around domesticity and homemaking.

While The Spinners draws its inspiration from a historical source, it also has clear contemporary connections. Long associated with domesticity, textile production was, by the early twentieth century, a central part of the industrial landscape. Sweatshops, which dotted New York City, produced textiles and garments at a rapid pace, and immigrant women made up the majority of workers employed in these factories. In the wake of workplace factory catastrophes such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire—in 1911, only one year before Benton would move to New York—unions experienced significant growth as labor rights increasingly became a national issue.

It was in this climate that the politically leftist Benton, himself a union supporter who devoted much of his mural and illustration work to the experiences of the American working class, produced The Spinners. A product of its period as much as a representation of the nation’s past, The Spinners reveals its multiple meanings through the women’s anachronistic appearances—absurdly modern for a depiction of eighteenth-century life—and their claustrophobic environment, which is not unlike a sweatshop. By layering colonial revival sentimentalism over a subtle critique of contemporary labor practices, Benton created an ambiguous, ambivalent view of women’s work in America.

Benton's America, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc., New York, New York, January 19–March 2, 1991. [exh. cat.]

A Narrative of American Art, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, February 13–October 31, 2004 (exhibited partial run: February 13–April 13, 2004; exhibited partial run with The American Historical Epic: Colonization theme: April 14–October 31, 2004).

Art in America: 300 Years of Innovation, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, NY and Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, IL (organizers). Venues: National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China, February 9–April 5, 2007; Shanghai Museum, Shanghai, China, April 30–June 30, 2007; Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China, April 30–June 30, 2007 (Shanghai presentations ran concurrently); The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia, July 23–September 9, 2007; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain, October 15, 2007–April 27, 2008. [exh. cat.]

Da Hopper a Warhol: Pittura Americana del XX secolo a San Marino (From Hopper to Warhol: American Painting of the Twentieth Century in San Marino), Linea d'ombra (organizer). Venue: Repubblica di San Marino, Palazzo Sums, January 21–June 3 2012. [exh. cat.]Terra Collection-in-Residence, Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, June 6, 2022-June 30, 2025.

  

“Decorations by Thomas Benton at the New Gallery.” The Evening Sun (February 19, 1927): 16. Ill. p. 16 (black and white).

Benton's America: Works on Paper and Selected Paintings. (exh. cat., Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc.). New York: Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc., 1991. Cat. no. 77, fig. 24, as Industry.

“Quick Sketches: Benton Goes to Terra.” American Artist 68: 744 (July 2004): 14. Text p. 14. Ill p. 14 (color), as Industry (Women  Spinning).

Art In America: 300 years of Innovation. Hong Kong: Wen Wei Publishing Co. Ltd, 2007. Text p. 123 (in Chinese), Ill. p. 122 (color).

Davidson, Susan, ed. Art in America: 300 Years of Innovation. (exh. cat., The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia). New York, NY: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; Chicago, IL: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2007. (Russian version). Ill. p. 221 (color), as Industry (American Historical Epic, Second Chapter).

Davidson, Susan, ed. Art in the USA: 300 años de innovación. (exh. cat., Guggenheim Museum Bilbao). New York, NY: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; Chicago, IL: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2007. (Spanish version). Ill. p. 165 (color).

Conrads, Margaret C., ed. The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: American Paintings to 1945. Kansas City, MO: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2007. Text p. 69; Ill. p. 66 (black & white), as Industry.

Bailly, Austen Barron. “Painting the American Historical Epic: Thomas Hart Benton and Race, 1919–1936.” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, March 2009. Text pp. xxi [Fig. 2.1, not illustrated], 95, 105-109, 296–300, 341 n. 6, 341 n. 8.

Da Hopper a Warhol: Pittura Americana del XX secolo a San Marino. (exh. cat., Linea d'ombra). Treviso, Italy: Linea d'ombra, 2012. Text p. 48; ill. p. 49 (color).