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IN HER 1854 PAINTING SHAKE HANDS? LILLY MARTJN SPENCER DEPICTS A LIVELY, self-confident woman standing in a dark kitchen, amid produce and wares painted in the style of a richly detailed Flemish still life (fig. 1). Disturbed while mixing bread in a pan, the young woman grins broadly and extends a hand caked with dough to the viewer. Shaking hands was a ritual of equality in early America, a symbol and assertion of the male citizen's status in a democracy.1 Seemingly ensconced in the domestic realm, the woman in the painting asserts her own sense of equality through her gesture. Therein lay the humor. Shake Hands? was a huge success. Spencer exhibited it in several cities, had it lithographed, and in 1857 sold it to the Cosmopolitan Art Association, which engraved it for distribution to its subscribers.
Why were Lilly Martin Spencer's paintings so popular in the 1850s? Art historians in general claim that Spencer's work appealed to the public because it operated both in and against sentimental culture.2 They have deftly charted the influence of domestic ideology on her choice of subjects and pointed to ways Spencer poked fun at, sexually enhanced, and enshrined the domestic realm. In these analyses, it is Spencer's embrace of domesticity, albeit uncertain and ambivalent, that dominates the construction and reception of her imagery and allows for its multiple and contradictory messages.3
But if we begin with a different focus-the origins of the humor in Shake Hands?-we find instead that Spencer's paintings were popular because they expressed a democratic sensibility shared by her public. Situating work by nineteenth-century women artists within the tradition of sentimental culture and domestic ideology has obvious advantages. But I want to challenge that practice by allowing other conditions of production and reception to take the ascendant position.4 Art comes to its particular form within a complex cultural situation that changes over time. In the 1850s sentimental culture was unfinished, the developing creation of conflicting and complementary political changes and economic forces that had momentous consequences for both men and women, especially those entering the middle classes.5 But it was only one condition of social life within a network of relations with which art and artists interacted. It therefore yields but a limited understanding of...