Vintage 1940s Gari Melchers "Mother and Child" Portrait Art Print

A 9" x 12" reproduction of Gari Melchers Mother and Child as a part of a late 1940s collection of the "World's Great Paintings" with title and commentary on reverse.

Commentary at time of printing: 

Mother and Child

GARI MELCHERS (American School 1860-1932)

Gari Melchers was born in Detroit. His father was a wood carver and a decorator, and it was under his direction that the boy early developed a talent for drawing. Then at the age of seventeen he was sent abroad to study-at Dusseldorf, since his mother seemed to have a somewhat lurid notion of the studios of Paris. Never-theless, at twenty-one he was in Paris, studying at the Julien Academy and the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Attracted by the picturesque qualities of Holland, he lived for fifteen years at Egmond-aan-Zee and it was there he learned to know the peasant folk he painted in many of his canvases. In 1888 he won the First Class Gold Medal at Munich, the first American to be thus honored.

In 1892 he came back to the United States briefly to execute a commission for the Chicago World's Fair, and in 1909 he was appointed Professor of Painting at the State Academy in Weimar.

The first World War brought him home to America, where he settled in his wife's ancestral home in Falmouth, VA.

Never a painter of the first magnitude, Gari Melchers was a sound academician whose pictures are enduringly popular. The beauty of motherhood was a theme that inspired him, as may be judged from his canvases on this subject at the Metropolitan in New York, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington and the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. Perhaps the most distinctive of all is the Mother and Child reproduced in this issue of the News, which may be seen in the Walter H. Schulze gallery of American paintings at The Art Institute of Chicago.

EDWIN SEAVER