“Our Lady of the Fruits of the Earth had appeared at the RA in 1917…one of four pictures he submitted that year, the others being portraits. The First World War still had a year to run, and the picture may make oblique reference to the crisis. The themes of motherhood, fecundity and regeneration, not to mention the mood of calm serenity, all seem to hold promise of the renewal that will, hopefully, come with the return of peace…Like so many of Cadogan Cowper’s pictures, Our Lady is full of references to art history. Perhaps the most obvious is the canopied hanging, clearly imitating the so-called ‘cloths of honour’ that so often hang behind the Virgin and Child in Renaissance paintings… The sheeps’ heads looking over the wattle fence have clearly been ‘lifted’ from those in Millais’s masterpiece The Carpenter’s Shop. The foliage that frames the patches of sky seems a deliberate echo of the vine in Rossetti’s Girlhood of the Virgin; and the form of the baby, together with the way he is ‘presented’ rather than being embraced or fondled, recalls the new-born child in Madox Brown’s unsettling picture Take your Son, Sir. It is true that none of these works had yet entered the Tate Gallery, where they all hang today, but a dedicated Pre-Raphaelite follower such as Cowper would undoubtedly have seen either the originals or reproductions.”

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Frank Cadogan Cowper At Sunnyside

Frank Cadogan Cowper at Christie’s

Frank Cadogan Cowper at Art Renewal Center

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Frank Cadogan Cowper at wikiwand

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