Description:

Harriet Fitzgerald
New York, (1904-1984)
Fuller and Mammy, 1939
oil on canvas
Harriet Fitzgerald learned the painter's craft in Virginia, New York and Europe before returning home to paint during the time of the Great Depression. As a 20th c. female humanist painter, she focused on people in a direct, straight-forward and truth-seeking fashion. Her work is mostly about individuals, often women and children; and she saw art as a manifestation of their daily lives and of their feelings and expressions. As a female she had access to all kinds of models including nannies, brides, working women, housewives, and children. A well-known university scholarship has been set up in Fitzgerald's name, awarded annually to a female art student at a women's college.

This painting, called _Fuller and Mammy_, is a portrait of a white infant boy "Fuller" being held in the arms of his Black nanny called "Mammy," the name for a stereotypical domestic figure of African American origin who often cared for children in white families in the Jim Crow era--which lasted until 1966. The expression on Mammy's face is somber, she doesn't look at the viewer, and she appears to have a lot on her mind. She wears a black and white long-sleeved shirt, a long white apron and a pair of glasses as she gazes down toward Fuller and toward the floor while the boy wears fancy and clean baby clothes as he holds a wooden toy and looks more optimistically out a window from what appears to be an upper-level storey of a home or apartment building. A tree with no leaves seen through a curtain shows us that it might be either early spring or late fall/ winter. The portrait is signed and dated '1939' so it was created after a full decade of economic depression (just at the end of the Great Depression) and just before World War II broke out--or perhaps it was painted right after war broke out in September 1939.

initialed and dated upper left, framed.

Provenance: Estate of Raymond Keith Kissee

  • Dimensions: 36 x 28 inches
  • Medium: oil on canvas

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September 16, 2023 10:00 AM CDT
St. Louis, MO, US

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