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Someone’s in a fowl mood in Young Husband: First Marketing, a 1854 painting by Lilly Martin Spencer. A well-known genre painter in her day, Spencer is one of a few women artists represented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s newly installed American-art galleries. 

Although men did the grocery shopping in Western states, as Met curator Carrie Rebora Barratt has noted, the scenario would have been unheard of in the East, and some press outlets denounced the picture for its demeaning representation of its clumsy male antihero.  

While it might be overdoing it to read a pre-feminist message in the comical scenario—about who is the weaker sex, and so on—it certainly provides a different image of men than most of the paintings in these rooms, whose protagonists tend toward cowboys and Revolutionary War heroes.

Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art/Promised Gift of Max N. Berry.