Strewn rocks and sparse tufts of vegetation punctuate a dry and otherwise barren landscape on what a combination of bright areas of paint and corresponding shadows suggest to have been a hot summer day.

In this early work from relatively shortly after Vedder's first arrival in Italy, dramatic movement is conveyed across both horizontal and vertical axes of the picture plane as the girl appears to step forward down the hillside and the spindle whirls, spinning thread from the distaff, midair.

Images of peasant girls spinning wool were a popular subject and appeared frequently in the works of nineteenth century artists, to whom the theme offered opportunities to romanticize rural life, document regional costume, as well as conjure up the iconography of Clotho and the Fates or Moirai of classical mythology, who are primeval goddesses that spin, apportion and eventually cut the thread of life to determine human fate.

[2] An inscription appearing on the back of an oil study for this picture that is dated August 19, 1867 reveals Vedder first developed the subject in Peasant Girl, spinning at "Le Casacce, between Perugia and Gubbio, while the artist was in Tuscany that Summer.

In his autobiography of 1910, The Digressions of V., Vedder listed this work as having been sold, along with Etruscan Girl with a Turtle (1867; Smith College Museum of Art), to New York publisher Jeremiah Curtis.