Friday, May 09, 2003

Medpundit Art History: There’s something hopelessly romantic about the mother-child relaltionship. No matter how ugly the reality of it can sometimes be, few of us can completely escape the temptation to idealize the love of a mother for her child.


And who better to idealize the ordinary than the Dutch masters? While previous generations of European artists specialized in translating the extraordinary tales of myth and religion into the ordinary, the Dutch genre painters of the 17th century specialized in translating the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Citizens of a newly formed Protestant nation that gloried in its hard won independence from Catholic Europe, they painted not for rich nobles, but for the common man. Their patrons were their fellow citizens, the bankers, farmers, and merchants, were willing to pay fair market value for their work. Not surprisingly, those same citizens, and their possessions, were the most popular subjects.




Painted around 1660 by Gabriel Metsu (1629-1667), Mother with Sick Child portrays in intimate detail a moment in the life of an ordinary mother and child. Once past infancy, children rarely sit still long enough to be held so totally in their mothers’ arms, unless they’re tired. Or sick. And it’s those moments that hark back to the days of infancy, when no personality conflicts or power struggles have yet to rear their heads. When both mother and child are starting with a blank slate. And when most mothers are willing to subsume all other concerns to the needs of their child. It is at such moments that the love of a mother for her child comes closest to the ideal.

Here, the mother holds her child in a pose that would have been quite familiar to his audience. We can’t see her face since she's completely absorbed in her child, but her demeanor seems one more consistent with calm scrutiny rather than alarm or anxiety, as if she’s objectively evaluating the severity of her child’s illness. Or perhaps she's trying to decide how best to get the medicine (or soup) in the bowl at the lower left corner into her offspring. The child, her sickness not severe enough to kill her curiousity looks straight at the viewer. Her languid attitude suggests that perhaps she just has a slight fever and her mother has undressed her in an attempt to cool her down.

Yet, in those days of smallpox, plague, and untreatable bacterial infections, every fever was a potential harbringer of death. Only time would tell what would prove to be a minor illness and what would be fatal. And this specter of death hovers in the picture, too. The mother's blood red skirt flows out from the child's side as if from a wound. The child's petticoat drapes across her lap like a shroud. On the wall behind the pair, to the right, hangs a dark painting of the crucifixion. Just barely discernable in its shadows is the figure of a woman in sorrow kneeling at the feet of her dying son. Which, in turn, brings to mind yet another familiar image of a mother and her suffering child echoed in the painting, reminding us that it's in ordinary moments like this that we come closest to perfect love.

 

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