Wayside Madonna

ClassificationsPaintings-oils

Artist Edith Catlin Phelps (American, 1874 - 1961)

Date1939

Made AtCalifornia, United States, North America

MediumOil on canvas

DimensionsFramed: 39 3/4 × 33 3/4 × 2 in. (101 × 85.7 × 5.1 cm)
35 1/4 × 29 × 1 in. (89.5 × 73.7 × 2.5 cm)

Credit LineGift of Mrs. Edith Catlin Phelps

Object number32158

DescriptionWayside Madonna is a tender depiction of a young woman draped in a purple shawl protectively holding her sleeping baby. She rests on a bench alongside a dirt road that winds into distant mountains in a landscape recalling rural Mexico or Old California. The painting is a poignant document of the Depression era of the 1930s, when many people were out of work and shelter. According to information on the reverse of the painting, it was most likely exhibited during a Madonna Festival held in Los Angeles during the Christmas season.

Edith Catlin Phelps was born on April 16, 1874 in New York City, New York. As a young woman, Phelps studied painting under William Merritt Chase and Charles Webster Hawthorne, and traveled to Paris to attend classes at the Académie Julian. She apparently lived a life of luxury, marrying the wealthy architect Stowe Phelps and residing in both Manhattan and Connecticut. She was herself a mother, adopting and raising a young girl and having a child of her own sometime around 1911. Phelps appears to have been living on the east coast until the Great Depression, when she and her family picked up and moved out to Santa Barbara in California.

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