1940 (ca.), Laura Wheeler Waring, Girl with Pomegranate -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) (special exhibition)
From the exhibition label: This rarely seen portrait by Waring, a painter and graphic artist who illustrated several early covers of the NAACP's Crisis magazine, conveys some of her varied artistic and activist interests. While the visage of the unnamed sitter is captured with portraitlike specificity, her dress is more loosely sketched. The backdrop covers all but a fragment of a watercolor, possibly inspired by the artist's travels in the south of France. Waring's careful attention to the pomegranate points to the fruit's multivalent symbolism as an emblem of prosperity, fertility, and sensuality in Greek myth and biblical and ancient Egyptian texts. As such, it also appears in a number of paintings by other New Negro artists and in the writings of Zora Neale Hurston.
1940 (ca.), Laura Wheeler Waring, Girl with Pomegranate -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) (special exhibition)
From the exhibition label: This rarely seen portrait by Waring, a painter and graphic artist who illustrated several early covers of the NAACP's Crisis magazine, conveys some of her varied artistic and activist interests. While the visage of the unnamed sitter is captured with portraitlike specificity, her dress is more loosely sketched. The backdrop covers all but a fragment of a watercolor, possibly inspired by the artist's travels in the south of France. Waring's careful attention to the pomegranate points to the fruit's multivalent symbolism as an emblem of prosperity, fertility, and sensuality in Greek myth and biblical and ancient Egyptian texts. As such, it also appears in a number of paintings by other New Negro artists and in the writings of Zora Neale Hurston.