1893
watercolor
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
Mother and Child on a Couch is a 1893 watercolor by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, a American Impressionism work, held at Victoria and Albert Museum.
The painting depicts a mother and child reclining on a couch, with the mother's arms wrapped around the child. The mother is nude, while the child is clothed. The scene is set against a backdrop of a room with a window, suggesting a domestic setting. The artist's use of watercolor creates a soft, dreamy quality to the painting. The brushstrokes are loose and expressive, with a focus on capturing the intimacy and tenderness of the moment. The painting's use of nudity and domestic setting suggests a focus on the natural and the everyday. For more on the artist's use of realism, look up Whistler, James Abbott McNeill.
A watercolour by James Abbott McNeill Whistler from 1893 depicts a sleeping woman in a pink sleeveless gown and a green headscarf or cap, lying on her side while cradling a young child. The work may correspond to an entry titled *Reclining figure with baby (violet and blue draperies)* in the artist’s sister-in-law’s 1901 studio inventory. It was bequeathed in 1903, later acquired by P. & D. Colnaghi in 1943, and subsequently purchased by the National Art Collections Fund for the Victoria and Albert Museum. Whistler produced multiple mother-and-child compositions in watercolour and lithography…
Read the full account in the museum source.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American painter in oils and watercolor, and printmaker, active during the American Gilded Age and based primarily in the United Kingdom.
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