Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Last Sickness
Alice Neel American
Not on view
This final portrait of the artist’s mother, Alice Concross Hartley Neel (1868–1954), is at once poignant and unflinching. Although dying of cancer, the older woman’s resilience is evident in the still-steady and firmly focused gaze as she regards her daughter, hinting at the complex relationship between the two women. Knowing these to be the waning months of her mother’s life and watching her body waste away, Neel approached the frail figure empathetically and with care—her brushwork is soft and follows the checkered pattern and striped trim of her mother’s robe in loose, painterly strokes that verge on abstraction.
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