Details

Kellogg Tyler’s best-known painting, The Mother, depicts a seated woman and her baby in a colorful room dominated by a mood of fullness and growth. Through its classical subject, the painting allowed Kellogg Tyler to demonstrate her considerable expertise: the perfect tiny hand of the sleeping baby, its swaddled body full and relaxed; the mother’s flushed face, looking downward at the child as she closes a white blouse billowing at the arms. Bright sun alights on the back of the mother’s head, an ordinary halo.

The Mother was accepted for exhibition in New York by the Society of American Artists in 1891, a rare honor for a Midwestern artist. It was also exhibited in the Fine Arts Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, which welcomed nearly twenty-seven million visitors to the fair’s “white city.” Many fairgoers ventured to Hull-House, a decidedly different operation amid the tenements and poverty of the Near West Side. This is where The Mother found a permanent home, when Kellogg Tyler gifted the painting to Jane Addams.