Maternité by Fernand Léger

Provenance:
Private Collection

To create this plaque, Fernand Léger worked with his pupil, the ceramicist Roland Brice, who was active in Biot in the late 1940s, where the artist had purchased a villa. Two editions of plaques—one of them featuring this mother and child motif—were produced during the artist’s lifetime for the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace held in 1948 in Wroclaw, Poland. In this painted ceramic, a woman in a vibrant orange top with a pearl necklace cradles a young child dressed in a dotted yellow shirt in her arms. The figures are shown holding hands, conveying notions of peace and unity through this simple gesture. Their expressions are serene, their facial traits thickly outlined in black paint. While the female figure dominates almost the entire surface of the plaque, the viewer’s eye is inevitably drawn to the thin leafy branch stretching at an angle towards the upper left.