An Italian Woman Spinning Flax

An Italian woman sits in a stone niche, her arm and hand caught in an elegant gesture as she holds flax thread — a popular motif from Italy that gave 19th-century painters the chance to compose sensitively observed figure studies of women spinning. The setting, with the woman seated on a stone block within a niche, places her in an ancient Roman environment, lending the domestic act an antique, timeless air. Uno Troili (1815–1875), an Italian painter of genre scenes and animal subjects, signed and dated the work 1847. The painting is held by the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, in a 97 × 74 cm format on canvas.