Young Mother

Vonnoh, a native of Saint Louis, was educated at the Chicago Art institute under Laredo Taft. She enjoyed a successful forty-year career making sculptures of upper class women at different stages of life and engaged in everyday activities. During the 1920s and 1930s, she executed a number of large fountain and garden pieces. Both these facets of her oeuvre reflect the growing taste for bronze sculpture to adorn private homes in early twentieth-century America. After her marriage to the painter and Pennsylvania Academy instructor Robert Vonnoh in 1899, the couple moved to Rockland Lake, New York. From 1900 onward, she exhibited widely at national and international exhibitions. "Young Mother" was apparently the first of her works to treat the theme of motherhood, and it became her best-selling work, reproduced in over thirty castings as well as numerous plaster copies. Vonnoh's impressionistic technique is marked by extremely subtle surface modulations. Facial features are merely suggested and eyes are indicated by shallow depressions, producing an idealized, and thus more symbolic, conception.