Bernard Jean Corneille Pothast

Artist Bio: Bernard Jean Pothast (1882-1966)

Bernard Pothast was a Belgian-born Dutch painter. His subjects consisted of mothers with their children, using traditional Academic Realism to create portraits of motherhood. Similar to artists such as Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch, Pothast used natural light to render his subjects, giving each scene an element of drama and evoking narrative though a sense of passing time. He studied at both the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Pothast’s paintings have retained their popularity in the market, and Mother with Children is a charming scene of a peasant mother with her children rendered in the artist’s traditional style.