Mother and Child

One of a number of secular paintings by Charles Hawthorne that resemble a Madonna and Child, Mother and Child was created at a moment when anxiety about falling birthrates was running high. This canvas is also a somber meditation on the United States' entry into World War I. Here, the dark palette, the mother's distracted expression and the child's scaled-down, olive drab uniform all serve as reminders of American soldiers' absence from home.

Hawthorne, the director of an art school in Provincetown, Massachusetts, developed a pictorial formula combining the palette and subject matter of Italian Renaissance painting with simplified forms and abstract backgrounds derived from Parisian modernism. His American audience found this synthesis very appealing.