Page:Woman in Art.djvu/316

WOMAN IN ART Twins." Motherhood, common to all countries, children, and painters, may be of varying characteristics, but mother-love is the same.

M. Giron has painted a Swiss mother with an armful of future citizenship. He is taking the nourishment nature provides, and seems not at all concerned with the high cost of living; nor does he realize that he is in a neutral country. The picture is a bit of realism, and technique does not disturb its value.

The sea-faring folk of France and Holland make good wives and faithful mothers, even to this age of divorcements. They were the first women in Europe to mother the orphan and the aged. There is a deal of heavy fog and rain, anxiety and sorrow over-hanging the fisher folk of Holland; their is a precarious calling, but Volkenberg has found entrance to many a sunlit room. The furnishing is simple, but the spirit of contentment comes to you out of the picture. Little sister at the foot of the cradle is drawn to the pink and white baby sleeping, just seen above the blanket. The mother's fingers are busy, and we doubt not her thoughts are, too.

Seldom in this modern day does an artist paint for religious reasons the Madonna and Child, but Louis Vaillant has a distinguished canvas entitled "Madonna of the Laurel." It might be merely a portrait for she certainly seems a Madonna of the home, there being no trace of a churchly picture, just a sweet and natural mother and child. Such are the thousands of Christian Madonnas in this Anno Domini 1927.

Intelligence comes rapidly to the developing child. Sir Joshua Reynolds depicts this in one of his portraits of a mother and her son. Lying in her arms, the babe is reading the spirit of the mother in her face as she tells him the love stories that only a mother can. The little spirit absorbs from her look, her smile, her frown, before the young brain can take in a word. To illustrate with a word-picture that proves the truth, although the child was able to use a few words.

In a living room hung a large copy of Hoffman's "Christ in the Temple with the Doctors." Facing the boy Christ sits a member of the Sanhedrin in deep and perplexed thought, his finger on his lip as he listens with wonder to the words of the boy, but do you know the face of the Rabbi? A tiny girl about two and a half years, singing a wordless happiness to herself, climbed upon the couch under the painting to play amid the soft pillows. Soon her eye caught the face of the Boy, radiating a sort of spirit-light as he talked. After a little, touching him with a dainty finger, far as tip-toes 250