(click to enlarge)
Lord Frederick Leighton
(English, 1830-1896)
Mother and Child, 1865
Oil on canvas
The season, the dead leaves, the smoke and the sunset are all images of transience, reminders that all things must pass It is a setting redolent of decay and death that makes us conscious that the girls in the foreground, for all their youth and beauty, must inevitably go through the same processes.