Famous Mother and Child Paintings: 12 Tender Icons
The most famous mother and child paintings run from medieval Madonnas to Mary Cassatt’s bath time. Twelve canvases about the oldest bond there is, including one painted to save a queen’s reputation, and one whose model was not a mother at all.
What you will find below
Five centuries of mothers, from gold ground Madonnas to a Paris apartment.
A nun, a queen and a painter’s sister all posed as mothers here.
The most tender painter of motherhood on this list never had children.
One of these mothers went to the guillotine six years after posing.
And Whistler’s Mother, the most famous mother in art, was a replacement model.
1 | The Child’s Bath, Mary Cassatt (1893)
A mother scrubs a child’s feet in a basin, seen from above like a Japanese print. No halos, no audience, just Tuesday.
Cassatt, the only American invited to exhibit with the Impressionists, never married and never had children. She watched harder than anyone. Her whole story is in my guide to Mary Cassatt.
2 | Madonna and Child, Filippo Lippi (about 1465)
The most human Madonna of the Renaissance, modeled, tradition says, on Lucrezia Buti, the nun Lippi ran away with.
Their scandal produced a son, Filippino, who grew up to be a painter too. The picture hangs in the Uffizi, and Lippi’s wild life is in my guide to Filippo Lippi.
3 | Whistler’s Mother, James McNeill Whistler (1871)
Its real title is Arrangement in Grey and Black No 1. Whistler insisted it was a study in color, and the world decided it was a portrait of every mother anyway.
Anna Whistler posed because a hired model failed to show up. The painting lives at the Musee d’Orsay, and the man behind it is in my guide to James McNeill Whistler.
4 | The Cradle, Berthe Morisot (1872)
A mother watches her sleeping baby through a veil of muslin. The mother is Edma, Morisot’s sister, who gave up painting when she married.
Morisot showed it at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, the only woman in the room. Her life is in my guide to Berthe Morisot.
5 | Madonna della Seggiola, Raphael (about 1514)
Mary wraps herself around her son inside a perfect circle. For three centuries this tondo was among the most copied paintings on earth.
Legend says Raphael sketched it on the bottom of a wine barrel when inspiration struck. The round format has its own history: what is a tondo.
6 | The Sick Child, Gabriel Metsu (about 1660)
A limp child on a mother’s lap, painted in the Dutch golden age. The pose deliberately echoes a pieta, the Virgin holding her dead son.
Painted during years when plague swept Amsterdam, it hangs in the Rijksmuseum as one of the tenderest pictures of the Dutch century.
7 | Self Portrait with Her Daughter, Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun (1786)
The painter of Marie Antoinette painted herself hugging her daughter Julie, and scandalized the Salon: her smile showed teeth, which polite portraiture forbade.
Mother and daughter later fell out bitterly over Julie’s marriage. Her escape from the Revolution is in my guide to Vigee Le Brun.
8 | Marie Antoinette and Her Children, Vigee Le Brun (1787)
Propaganda as motherhood. The hated queen was repainted as a devoted mother to save her reputation, with an empty cradle for the daughter who had just died.
It failed. Six years later the mother in the picture went to the guillotine. The painting stayed at Versailles.
9 | The Madonna of the Pinks, Raphael (about 1507)
A teenage mother plays with her baby, handing him carnations. For 140 years it hung in a corridor labeled as a copy.
In 1991 a curator recognized the real thing. The National Gallery in London bought it in 2004 for about 22 million pounds.
10 | Mother and Child, Pablo Picasso (1921)
A giant, calm, classical mother from Picasso’s years as a new father. He painted the subject again and again after his son Paulo’s birth in 1921.
The monumental version in the Art Institute of Chicago shows how a man famous for taking figures apart could also build one like a temple.
11 | The Third Class Carriage, Honore Daumier (about 1862)
A tired grandmother, a nursing mother and a sleeping boy on a wooden train bench. Motherhood without a drop of varnish.
Daumier, jailed once for mocking the king, painted the poor without pity or preaching. The unfinished version hangs at the Met.
12 | The Flemish Madonnas of Jan van Eyck’s century
The northern painters put Mary in a living room, with brass pots and a view of a Flemish street. Heaven moved into the house.
That domestic turn changed European art: the sacred mother became a woman at home, centuries before Cassatt’s basin. The painter who started it is in my guide to Jan van Eyck.
Where the mothers hang
The Uffizi has Lippi, the Pitti Palace has the Seggiola, and the Musee d’Orsay has Whistler’s Mother and The Cradle a few rooms apart.
The Met keeps the Daumier, and the National Gallery in London shows the 22 million pound Madonna it almost ignored.
Mothers in art, the usual questions
What is the most famous mother and child painting? Whistler’s Mother by fame, the Madonna della Seggiola by centuries of copies, The Child’s Bath by affection.
Why are there so many Madonna paintings? For a thousand years the Virgin and Child was the most commissioned subject in Christian Europe. Painters learned motherhood through Mary.
Did Mary Cassatt have children? No. The most convincing painter of mothers and children never married and had none.
What is Whistler’s Mother really called? Arrangement in Grey and Black No 1. Whistler wanted you to see composition, the public saw a mother.
Where can I see the most of these in one museum? The Musee d’Orsay in Paris, which holds Whistler’s Mother and Morisot’s The Cradle.
A closing fact: when France bought Whistler’s Mother in 1891, America was stung enough that the painting later toured the United States as a borrowed national treasure, and landed on a postage stamp in 1934.