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View at the museum ↗Happy Home: Bowl of Vegetables
Rebecca Salsbury James1940
- Attribution
- Rebecca Salsbury James (American, born England, 1891–1968)
- Medium
- Oil on glass
- Physical dimensions
- 50.8 × 61 cm (20 × 24 1/16 in.)
- Credit line
- Through prior gift of the Walter H. Schulze Memorial Collection; through prior bequest of Ira Simon; Roger and J. Peter McCormick and Wesley M. Dixon Jr. endowment funds; Arts of the Americas Discretionary Fund; purchased with funds provided by the Roy and Irene Rettinger Foundation; through prior gift of the George F. Porter Collection; Mr. and Mrs. Frederick G. Wacker Jr. Endowment Fund; through prior purchase of the Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize Fund
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View the museum record ↗From the museum
This luminous depiction of root vegetables piled into a bowl showcases Rebecca Salsbury James’s signature style: exacting, hard edged, and flat. A member of the circle of American artists promoted by photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz, James demonstrated her independence as an artist through her choice of medium: reverse glass painting. In 1928, dissatisfied with her early artistic explorations in pastel and watercolor, the artist took on this challenging technique, which entails painting on the backside of the glass. The artist must apply the foremost details of a composition first, before adding the subsequent background layers, a process that allows little room for error. Although a number of modernists explored reverse painting on glass, none mastered it to the same extent as James.
Description: Art Institute of Chicago · CC BY 4.0