[Seated mother and child]

Rothko and his wife Edith Sachar (1912–1981) spent the summer of 1937 apart. Edith worked at Camp Lake Bryn Mawr in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, while Rothko spent time in Mahopac, New York, about fifty miles north of Manhattan. He painted and spent time planning and beginning a draft of a book manuscript. He returned periodically to New York City to maintain his enrollment in the Works Project Administration program (WPA). Among the friends with whom he visited during the summer of 1937 was Nancy Weisman. In a letter to Edith dated and postmarked Tuesday, July 6, 1937, Rothko writes that he had “labored at my first picture only to discard it. I did then a mother and child which was successful[.]” Beneath this passage appears a small sketch of a seated mother holding a small child in the crook of her left arm (fig. 1). In her right hand she holds what might be a glass or a bottle for the child. Beneath the drawing, Rothko wrote, “Something like this, much more orderly and charming. This for the project.”

The sketch in the letter relates closely to the current drawing as well as to a pair of similar paintings on canvas. The current whereabouts of the canvases are unknown. One is known only through a photograph taken for the WPA Federal Art Project (the “project” to which Rothko refers in the letter, presumably) taken on 27 October 1937. Similarities between the current drawing and the reportorial sketch in Rothko’s letter of July 6, 1937, suggest a creation date for the current drawing shortly prior to his posting of the letter. Although Nancy Weisman was pregnant during the summer of 1937, she did not give birth until late August of that year as reported by Rothko in a letter to Edith dated September 1, 1937: “I have almost forgotten to tell you that Nancy, finally, did have her baby last Friday night. A boy.” The current drawing, therefore, cannot be a portrait of Nancy and her newborn son. It is reasonable to assume that other drawings on sheets of bond paper with two holes along the edge identical to the current drawing also date to the summer of 1937 when Rothko was spending time in Mahopac, NY.