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36
MOTHER AND CHILD - THREADS OF LIFE
1894
FREDERICK
CAYLEY ROBINSON, A.R.A.
1862 - 1927
Oil
on canvas, 60.9 x 76.2 (24 x 30)
Signed
and dated, F.CAYLEY ROBINSON, 1894 (lower right)
Provenance:
possibly acquired from the artist by Cecil French.
Exhibited:
Royal British Society of Artists, Winter Exhibition,
1894-5 (196 as Mother and Child, £70); Fine Art
Society, London, Frederick Cayley Robinson, 1977 (7).
Literature:
Magazine of Art, 1895, repr. p.127; Art Journal, 1905, repr.
p.384; M.A.Stevens, Frederick Cayley Robinson, The
Connoisseur, September 1977, p.26.
A
pensive woman sits at the left of the composition, facing
right, with her right forearm resting on a dining table, in
her hand she holds a needle and thread with which she has
been embroidering a narrow hanging which lies flat on the
table, steam rises from a blue and white bowl at the centre
of the table. Behind her, against a lace-curtained window,
sits a red-haired girl, facing right, eating from a white
bowl which she holds in her right hand. At the back edge of
the table wooden Noah's Ark figures stand in line. All is
lit from above by a hanging oil lamp. An open triptych showing
angels awaking a sleeping shepherd and the Virgin and Child
hangs on the right wall.
Presumably
painted immediately after Robinson's return from Paris, where
he had been studying at the Academy Julian since 1891. During
his stay in France Robinson admired the work of Puvis de Chavannes
and the Nabis and their influences may be seen in both the
technique and obscure symbolism of this work.
Enigmatic
groupings of two or more female figures around a table in
a lamp-lit room, frequently occur in his work. The Depth
of Winter, c.1900 (90.1 x 116.2) in a private collection,
is a related painting which also features an incomplete embroidery
(illustrated in Frederick Cayley Robinson, Fine Art
Society, 1977, no.11) as does A Souvenir of a Past Age,
1894, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.
Cecil
French wrote an article, The Later Work of F.Cayley Robinson,
The Studio, Vol.83, June 1922, in which, despite detecting
a possible lack of intensity in Robinson's recent paintings,
he recorded his early admiration for the artist's work. "I
would record - with no disrespect, I hope, to the other members
of the Society - that it was the infrequent appearance of
Cayley Robinsons at the (Royal Society of) British Artists
that drew me, as a boy, to those exhibitions."
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