I have a print of this in my bedroom that was my mother’s and used to sit in my parents‘ fireplace in their bedroom when I was little. I find it especially poignant because her print is only a section of the painting that includes the mother and child, and my mother never got to grow old and become the final age. Sometimes the old woman in this painting is interpreted as the remembrance of death, so it not being in her print feels fitting for my mother who so desperately wanted to live to be with her children. it was her birthday yesterday so I felt I had to include it. I also find it meaningful in a way I can’t describe that the only other painting I inherited from her was John William waterhouse’ The Lady of Shallot, another of my favourites, which is also a woman dying.
