The archetypal theme of mother and child appears in paintings throughout Avery’s career. Especially tender examples can be seen from the 1930s, when Avery completed many loving paintings of his wife, Sally, with their daughter, March, who was born in 1932. It is thought that Nursing Mother, 1962, in fact depicts Avery’s wife and daughter and is inspired by a much earlier work, completed in the 1930s. Certainly, during this period, Avery drew increasingly on the fertile and expansive territories of memory and experience. Characterised by economy of touch and luminescence of colour, his paintings of the early 1960s see the artist apply a lifetime of expertise to such cherished subjects and motifs, and Nursing Mother is a crystalline reflection of his accumulated skills in depicting the figure.

The sublime light in these late works is particularly sympathetic to the theme of Nursing Mother. Writing about the quality of luminescence in paintings from this period, Waqas Wajahat notes, ‘Well versed in the traditions of contrasting light and shadow in portrait painting, Avery instead chose to infuse his works with an overall and consistent illumination. [They] appear backlit, as if they were painted on a sunlit windowpane or a lightbox. This effect was achieved by the careful application of thin layers of translucent pigment, a technique gleaned from his commitment to other media, in particular watercolor and monotype… Constantly in search of new ways to activate his surfaces… Avery introduced rags in place of brushes, allowing him to create broad swathes of uniform color with minimal effort. Often outlined, and not unlike Henri Matisse’s late works, Avery’s portraits from this time period evoke a sense of refined simplicity which belies their compositional complexity. The contours of the faces and bodies reflect each subject’s distilled characteristics while serving to animate the space within the composition.’

Avery’s use of rags to apply pigment to conjure a lively, active surface with great economy is especially evident in this painting, which sets up a powerful dynamic between horizontals and verticals, locating and holding the figures while echoing the pose of seated mother and recumbent child.

Significant achievements for Avery in 1962 include the publication of Milton Avery: Painting 1930-1960 by Hilton Kramer, the first monograph on the artist.

About the artist

One of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Milton Avery (1885–1965) is celebrated for his luminous paintings of landscapes, figures and still lifes, which balance distillation of form with free, vigorous brushwork and lyrical colour.

Avery’s work is represented in major museums and private collections worldwide including the Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; LACMA; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; MoMA; National Gallery of Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Phillips Collection; SFMOMA; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Tate; Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in collaboration with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, a major retrospective of Avery’s work commences at The Modern, Fort Worth this autumn (7 November 2021–30 January 2022), travelling to the Wadsworth Atheneum (24 February–5 June 2022) and the Royal Academy of Arts (15 July–16 October 2022). Currently on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum (until 17 October 2021), Milton Avery: The Connecticut Years presents an intimate look at the formative years of the modernist master.