Famous paintings of mothers come in two families: the Virgin with her child, and real women, often the painter's own mother, sister or self.
The first came from the Church, where painters learned anatomy and tenderness by painting Mary with her child.
Then the money moved. Rich families paid for portraits of a mother with her children, a show of status. By the 1800s, painters selling to dealers chose their subjects, often the home life older commissions left out.
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How These Were Chosen
A mother earns a place here by doing one of three things:
Shows a real, named mother whose life we can trace in letters or records.
Hangs in a public museum anyone can walk into.
Changes how painters showed mothers, with a pose, a setting or a kind of mother nobody had painted before.
12. Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of the Artist's Mother (1888)
The face in this portrait does not match the photograph Van Gogh was copying. He painted it in Arles in October 1888. He worked from a small card photograph that his sister Wil had mailed him from Holland. The photograph and the finished canvas face in opposite directions.
Conservators at the Norton Simon Museum think the mismatch means Van Gogh used an episcope, a device that projects an image for tracing and reverses it in the process. The finished portrait now hangs at that same museum, in Pasadena, California.
The photograph was black and white, so every color in the portrait came from Van Gogh's memory. He gave his mother pale green eyes and set her against a bright green background. On her dark dress, he laid a deep red over blue.
My eye goes straight to the green, because he put it everywhere: in her eyes, in the shadows of her face and across the whole background. In a letter to Theo, he said he could not stand the colorless photograph and wanted to paint her as he remembered her.
Vincent left the Netherlands for good in late 1885 and never went back. After that, mother and son communicated only by letter. That lasted until his death in 1890. Anna outlived him by seventeen years, dying in 1907 at eighty seven.
By then she had also outlived two of her other sons. Theo died six months after Vincent. Cor, her youngest, died in South Africa in 1900.
Anna was not the one who built her son's fame. That fell to Johanna Bonger, who had been married to Theo for less than two years when he died. Suddenly she owned hundreds of Vincent's paintings and drawings, along with stacks of his letters.
She spent decades lending the paintings to exhibitions. She also edited his letters to Theo and published them in 1914. Slowly, a painter almost nobody had heard of while he was alive became one of the most famous in the world. Anna barely appears in that part of the story.
At a Glance
Artist: Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890)
Painted: October 1888, in Arles
Medium: Oil on canvas
Where to see it: Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California
About This Painting
Does Van Gogh's portrait of his mother still look the way he painted it?
Van Gogh's portrait of his mother has faded. John Griswold, a conservator at the Norton Simon Museum, found two colors that fade in light on her face and clothing: cochineal and eosin, an early synthetic dye. A red glaze over the dark blue of her dress has faded, so the blue now dominates.
Who was Van Gogh's mother?
Van Gogh's mother was Anna Carbentus, born in The Hague in 1819, the daughter of a bookbinder. She married Theodorus van Gogh, a Protestant pastor, in 1851. Her first son, also named Vincent, was stillborn in 1852, exactly one year before the painter was born.
Did Van Gogh paint the portrait as a gift for his mother?
Van Gogh painted the portrait of his mother for himself, not as a gift. In his letter to Theo he called it a size 8 canvas and said he wanted it in blond coloring.
11. Paula Modersohn-Becker, Kneeling Mother with Child at Her Breast (1906)
Paula Modersohn-Becker painted Kneeling Mother with Child at Her Breast in Paris in 1906. A nude mother kneels on a white cloth and nurses her baby. Oranges lie on the ground around her, and dark leaves rise behind her. Her face is seen in profile and calm, and it looks past the child rather than down at it.