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Woman Knitting
Paul Wayland Bartlett (born New Haven, CT 1865-died Paris, France 1925)
modeled 1885, cast 1895
- Medium
- bronze mounted on wood
- Classification
- Sculpture
- Dimensions
- 17 3/4 x 13 7/8 in. (45.1 x 35.3 cm)
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Armistead Peter III
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Smithsonian Institution
About this work
In the late nineteenth century, images of women knitting and working at spinning wheels alluded to American colonial life, popularly known as the age of homespun. Such scenes embodied nostalgia and patriotism in the midst of rapid technological changes. Although Paul Bartlett was living in France at the time he made this work, he maintained close ties to America throughout his career. Like his subject matter, the casting technique that Bartlett used was also enjoying a revival in popularity. Lost-wax casting, or cire perdue, involved casting the model with wax to reveal the smallest detail of the original. Bartlett set up a foundry in his studio in the 1890s to experiment with this method. Woman Knitting was modeled in 1885, but Bartlett did not cast it until ten years later and proudly inscribed the wax model, “Cire Perdue---Fondue en 1895.”
