Homer has drawn a young woman sitting on an upholstered stool, her concentration focused on peeling a lemon. Most of Homer’s paintings and drawings of the mid-seventies represent ordinary people engaged in simple tasks, or just being at ease. This young woman, wearing the same blouse and jacket, is seen playing backgammon in a watercolor of the following year.1
The drawing has also been known as Woman Peeling an Apple.
1. Entitled Backgammon; see Exhibition of Watercolors, Paintings and Drawings by Winslow Homer, New England Museums Association ([Boston?], 1936), p. 8 [illustrated].
—Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann, Standish D. Lawder, and Charles W. Talbot, Jr., Drawings from the Clark Art Institute, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 1:138-39, no. 335.
