Family
Parents, children and relatives pictured together, as they wished to be seen and as they were.
59 works · 10 related artists
About
Family pictures show how people want their kin to be seen, and sometimes what they would rather hide. In Ming and Qing China, ancestor portraits placed generations of forebears in formal rows for veneration, and in the Dutch Republic Frans Hals painted prosperous families posed in landscapes as proof of harmony and good fortune.
The 19th century let the strain show. Edgar Degas's The Bellelli Family (1858–67) separates a stern mother and her daughters from a father turned away in his chair. Photography brought the family album into art. Carrie Mae Weems's Kitchen Table Series (1990) follows one woman through love, motherhood and friendship around a single table, and Richard Billingham's Ray's a Laugh (1996) records his parents' cramped flat in the West Midlands without softening anything. Painters such as Joy Labinjo work from snapshots of relatives, turning private albums into large, colourful scenes of shared life.
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