Mother and child

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Miss Grace Joel displays the courage of her convictions. The work is obviously not a pot-boiler; obviously not the product of a lady ‘who does a little painting now and again’. The artist is working on right lines leading to success.1

This assessment of Grace Joel’s works was made in response to the paintings she left behind for exhibition at Wellington’s annual Academy exhibition, following her permanent departure for England in March 1907. From then until her death in 1924, Joel was a regular exhibitor in Paris and London, making appearances at both the Royal Academy in London and the Société des Artistes Français in Paris. This painting is most likely that exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1912 with the title L’amour maternelle, reported in the Feilding Star to be a ‘life size’ painting of a ‘mother with nude child in her arms’.2 Joel’s mother is wholly absorbed in her child, who lies sprawling dreamily across her lap. The painting is built up with buttery layers of cream and rose-tinted tones and conveys both the intimacy and physicality of the relationship between mother and child. One can almost feel the breath of the child nuzzling into the mother’s chest, and imagine how the child’s soft skin yields beneath the mother’s firm yet loving hands.

While the subject matter of mother and child has had a continuous place in the history of art, it shed its religious overtones in the late nineteenth century. There is a great poignancy in the fact that many female artists who were committed to this genre, such as the American impressionist Mary Cassatt, never married or had children, recognising that it would be incompatible with their artistic ambitions. This was also true for Joel, who was not a ‘lady “who does a little painting now and again”’, but rather a committed and professional artist. Consequently there is something remarkably touching and a little ironic that it was with her sensuous portraits of modern Madonnas that she secured her reputation.

Rebecca Rice

1 ‘Academy of Arts: An interesting exhibition’, Evening Post, 12 October 1907, p. 9.

2 ‘London letter: New Zealanders at home’, Feilding Star, 22 May 1912, p. 1.