Happy Home: Bowl of Vegetables

This luminous depiction of root vegetables piled into a bowl showcases Rebecca Salsbury James’s signature style: exacting, hard edged, and flat. A member of the circle of American artists promoted by photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz, James demonstrated her independence as an artist through her choice of medium: reverse glass painting. In 1928, dissatisfied with her early artistic explorations in pastel and watercolor, the artist took on this challenging technique, which entails painting on the backside of the glass. The artist must apply the foremost details of a composition first, before adding the subsequent background layers, a process that allows little room for error. Although a number of modernists explored reverse painting on glass, none mastered it to the same extent as James.