Mother and Child

A mother cradles her child against her body, both wrapped in the cold, melancholy blue that saturates the canvas, their faces gentle and grave. Picasso painted mothers and children repeatedly during his Blue Period, drawn to themes of poverty, tenderness, and quiet suffering. Now in Harvard's collections, this Mother and Child distills the mood of those years - the monochrome blue lending the humble, age-old subject a hushed sorrow. The young artist, poor himself in Paris and Barcelona, found in such figures of maternal love and hardship the keynote of his first great personal style.