Winding the skein

Winding the Skein is an oil painting by Frederic Leighton, shown at the Royal Academy in 1878, the same year he was elected its president. It depicts two Greek girls, fair-skinned and fair-haired, absorbed in an ordinary household task. They sit on the flat roof of a house that opens onto a distant sea and purple hills. The seated girl, wrapped in white, holds the skein of wool with her bare feet crossed beneath her chair, while the younger one, dressed in red and white, winds it into a ball. The colours are sharply contrasted, and the blue sea and distant hills give the background a brilliant, luminous quality. What makes the picture notable is how it turns a everyday gesture into something timeless. Leighton handles a simple subject in a classical manner, close to his earlier The Music Lesson. One contemporary critic praised exactly this ability to lift the familiar into the realm of classical art without slipping into antiquarianism: the girls could be English in another setting, but the Greek scenery gives them a lasting dignity.

Painter

Frederic Leighton

Date

1878

Medium

oil paint

Dimensions

100 × 161 cm

Museum

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Movement

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

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