Twelve paintings, from Piero della Francesca's Madonna del Parto (1450 to 1465) to Alice Neel's Margaret Evans Pregnant (1978), show how painters treated pregnancy, which for centuries they hid under drapery, kept for a few religious scenes or turned into a joke.
Some show the belly plainly. In others, it lives in a gesture, an object or a guess, like the old question of whether the woman in Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait of 1434 is expecting at all.
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How These Were Chosen
A mother holding her baby was not enough to make the list. Each work had to meet one of three conditions: the body shows the child, the story in the picture turns on a pregnancy, or the object was made for a real birth.
Some pictures also earned a place through a debate. When scholars still argue over whether a sitter is with child at all, that argument is part of her story.
12. Jan Steen, The Doctor's Visit (about 1660 to 1665)
In a Dutch sickroom, a young woman in a pale satin skirt sits slumped in a chair while a doctor in a tall black hat holds her wrist. Behind her, a grinning man dangles a herring over her head.
The fish is a joke. In Dutch comic pictures of the time, a herring often carried a crude sexual meaning, and Jan Steen, who painted The Doctor's Visit around 1660 to 1665 on a small panel now in Philadelphia, liked his jokes broad.
Doctors' visits were one of Steen's favorite subjects, and they follow a pattern. The patient is usually a young woman, and her trouble is one of two things: lovesickness, the pining of someone in love, or a suspected pregnancy.
This time the evidence lies on the floor near her slipper. A small earthenware pot holds glowing coals, and on them a ribbon is smoldering. It is a quack's test, the kind of trick a charlatan sold, for finding out whether a woman was carrying a child.
In one version of the test, the ribbon was first dipped in the patient's urine and then burned. If the smell made her sick, she was judged to be expecting.
The doctor sees none of this. With his fingers on her pulse, he seems startled by how fast it beats. The likely reason has just walked in: a young man in a red cloak stands in the doorway at the left, hat in hand, and she turns toward him. He is, in all likelihood, the cause of her condition.
Only the man with the herring laughs. He seems to know what the doctor will find.
Steen spelled the joke out on another of his doctor's visits, now in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. The rhyme painted on that canvas reads, in translation, "Unless my fantasy runs wild, this poor girl is now with child."
At a Glance
Artist: Jan Steen (1626 to 1679)
Painted: About 1660 to 1665
Medium: Oil on panel
Where to see it: Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection
About This Painting
How big is Jan Steen's The Doctor's Visit in Philadelphia?
Jan Steen's The Doctor's Visit measures 46 by 36.8 centimeters, about 18 by 14 1/2 inches. It came to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with the John G. Johnson Collection in 1917.
Did Jan Steen paint more than one doctor's visit?
Yes. Jan Steen returned to the subject many times, and the Mauritshuis in The Hague owns one of these pictures, The Sick Girl, painted around 1660.
What was the wandering womb?
The wandering womb was an old medical belief that the womb could move inside the body and cause illness. According to the Mauritshuis, the foul smell of burning coals and ribbons was thought to coax it back into place.
Is the girl in The Doctor's Visit pregnant?
Steen leaves the question open. The Philadelphia Museum of Art reads the scene as lovesickness or pregnancy, with the young man in the doorway as the probable cause.
11. Gustav Klimt, Hope I (1903)
A red-haired woman stands naked in profile, her belly round with a child, her hands folded just above it. She turns her head and looks straight at us. The Austrian artist Gustav Klimt painted her in Vienna in the summer of 1903, then kept her out of the exhibition she seems to have been made for.