Jewish Woman with Oranges. Alexander Gierymski (1881). National Museum Warsaw. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout
There is nothing attractive about toil—this mind-numbing effort of farming or doing some menial, repetitive tasks—to the person who is doing it. It can however, be appealing to artists as a subject, especially if such hard-grinding toil is experienced by the “weaker sex.” Artist could show hard work in a sympathetic light, often with an express purpose of tugging at the gallery public’s heartstrings.