Mother and Child. Frederic George Stephens (1827–1907). c. 1854. Oil paint on canvas. Support: 470 x 641 mm; frame: 680 x 842 x 56 mm. Courtesy of Tate Britain. N04634. Bequeathed by H.F. Stephens 1932. Available on the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported) licence. [Click on image to enlarge it.]
This is such a sad painting. The mother leans forward, almost unseeing, her hand still holding a letter she has just read. Her child, who has been playing beside her, realises something is wrong and reaches out one hand to her. Considering the approximate date of the painting, and the toy cavalryman among the child's playthings, the supposition is that the father of this little family has been killed in the Crimean War. Many died in the later months of 1854 (when Florence Nightinagle went out to help). The mother's shock and the child's instinctive solicitude are both keenly felt. In title and form, the painting, which is clearly still a work in progress, seems to play on the religious theme of sacrifice and the consequent distress of the bereaved.
This is one of the few paintings to have survived Stephens's blitz on his own work as he turned instead to art criticim: "Realizing that he would not succeed as a painter, he attempted to destroy all of his pictures in the late 1850s, and only six works of art — now in the Tate collection and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford — escaped his wrath" (MacLeod). He devoted himself instead to writing about art. Although his work in establishing this new discipline was valuable, it seems a shame now that he should have given up his own skills, and left such a painting as this unfinished. — Jacqueline Banerjee
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Bibliography
Macleod, Diane Sashko. "Stephens, Frederic George (1827–1907), art critic and art historian." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Web. 6 October 2019.
Last modified 6 October 2019