An Eternal Embrace: How Artists Have Captured Motherhood

We tend to forget the small gestures and interactions with our mothers — the feelings that a single moment could stir in our youngest hearts. Utamaro creates a humorous scene between a mother, an infant child and another woman, possibly an older daughter or maid. He maintains that quiet elegance and beauty we have always admired in our mothers. How many of us recall watching her morning routine, sitting on the bed as she rouged her cheeks — some of our earliest understandings of what femininity could be. The mother casts a lighthearted energy across the piece by simply sticking out her tongue, as the woman beside her struggles to contain her laughter.

Some of us may consider the Virgin Mary the original mother. Viewed through the lens of Mother's Day, she becomes something more familiar, a simple mother who gave her son to the world. There is something beautiful in the idea that we choose our mothers before we are born, giving quiet purpose to something as natural as love itself. De Flandes replicated Rogier van der Weyden's original almost exactly for Queen Isabella of Castile, a piece that carried deep personal significance as her father had once owned the very painting himself. At its heart, it tells a quietly devastating story — a man betrayed by those he loved, who upon resurrection sought out the one person he knew would always be there. His mother. This Mother's Day, let that be the reminder to thank our mothers.

This simple piece provides us with the everyday, ordinary to us but everything to her. Those small moments where we can be acting like rascals and yet through our mothers' eyes we are depicted as angels who bring light to the everyday. Bouguereau perfectly captures that tender gaze, something he made look effortless in most of his work, and only a mother can give. No matter what wild one you are, to them we will always be their little ray of sunshine.The bright colors the mother brings into a darker room emphasize the beams of light that give a halo to her little one, alongside the coziness of her cooking, the warm fire and the greens scattered across their kitchen. And perhaps that is the most honest portrait of motherhood, not the grand gestures but the quiet ordinary ones.

There is something about watching someone look at an old photograph of their mother. That quiet moment where you find yourself in a room full of her, in the fabric she loved, in the photos she kept, in everything she left behind. Akunyili Crosby builds this world from fragments of real family photographs pressed into the floor and fabric made in honor of her own mother, turning personal grief into something we can all walk into. She sits with her back to us but we feel it all the same. This Mother's Day is for those of us who can no longer pick up the phone, who celebrate with memory instead of presence. She may not be here but she is still everywhere, in the culture she passed down, in the person you became, in the room you still feel her in.

Nobody talks enough about how hard it is. The sleepless nights, the silent struggles, the weight of giving everything you have to someone else. Picasso captures that here in the cool blues and greens that wash over her tired body, a color he used in this period to speak of hardship and melancholy, one that seems to seep from the inside out. And yet the baby in her arms remains the warmest brightest thing in the room, still glowing while she carries it all. That is motherhood in its most honest form, giving your light to someone else even on the days you feel you have none left. This Mother's Day, tell her you noticed. Tell her that even on the days she felt like she was running on empty, she was still the brightest thing in your world too.