Milton Avery

Private Collection, West Hartford, Connecticut

Christie's New York, 1 June 1984, lot 286 (consigned by the above)

Knightsbridge Fine Art, New York (acquired from the above)

New York, DC Moore Gallery, n.d.

Although the dominating tones of blue seemingly imbue a somber tone to the present work, Avery discovered color as a primary method of expression in the 1940s. The artist’s wife, Sally Avery, explained, “his spirits soared and his paintings blossomed. His color became clearer, sharper, and higher keyed, his shapes more stark and hard edged (Thomas Gibson Fine Art, Milton Avery: Figures from the Forties, London 1981, p. 9). In the blue tones of the present work, Avery was certainly thinking forward to earlier painters, most immediately Pablo Picasso and that artist’s so-called ‘Blue Period’ of the early 1900s during a depressive state. However, Avery simultaneously produced a pochoir print of a Mother and Child in an identical chair utilizing an entirely different palette and emotive connotation.

Both that and the present work represent two of many forays in which Avery engaged with one of the most enduring themes in Western art, the Virgin and Child. Nevertheless, cropped just above his sitter's waist, Mother and Child is more portrait than devotional work. Although Avery was certainly thinking about the Madonnas of the Renaissance, his work owes the most to Vincent van Gogh’s images of the Postmaster’s wife, Madame Roulin, who holds her baby, Marcelle, before a decorative background in several of the Dutchman’s paintings.