Girl with Pomegranates
Laura Wheeler Waring American
Waring was a painter and graphic artist who illustrated several early covers of the NAACP’s Crisis magazine. Her portrayals of Black women across the social spectrum solidified her stature as the foremost Black female painter of the Harlem Renaissance. Here, while the visage of the unnamed sitter is captured with portraitlike specificity, her dress is more loosely sketched. The backdrop veils a landscape propped against the wall, possibly inspired by the artist’s travels in the south of France. Waring’s careful attention to the rendering of two pomegranates points to the fruit’s multivalent symbolism as an emblem of prosperity, fertility, and sensuality in Greek myth and ancient Egyptian texts. It also appears in paintings by other Harlem Renaissance artists and in the writings of Zora Neale Hurston.
This image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.
