Yours for Good Fermentables ™: Pic(k) of the Week: Child & mother.

Saturday, May 13, 2017

Pic(k) of the Week: Child & mother.

Tomorrow is "Mother's Day," observed due to the efforts of a 19th and 20th-century social reformer and peace advocate.

Anna Reeves Jarvis (1864-1948) was a social activist of the 19th and early 20th centuries. A close friend of Julia Ward Howe, Jarvis was the first female literary and advertising editor for Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company.

In 1905, after the death of her mother, Jarvis began a campaign to make Mother's Day a recognized holiday in the United States. The day was first celebrated in the U.S. in 1908, when Jarvis held a memorial for her mother at St Andrew's Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia.

In 1908, the U.S. Congress rejected a proposal to make Mother's Day an official holiday. But, in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation designating Mother's Day, held on the second Sunday in May, as a national holiday to honor mothers.

—Wikipedia [accessed 13 May 2017].

Later in life, Jarvis became perturbed by the commercialization of the day's observance.

A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment.

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Child & Mother
Small sculpture by Klara Sever, ~1990s.

Klara Sever was born in 1935 in Slovakia, Czechoslovakia (neé Klara Klein). She studied at the School of Art and Design and at the Comenius University in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia [now Slovakia]. She worked as a sculptor and restorer on some of Czechoslovakia’s most beautiful baroque castles, and also designed new architectural sculpture for the interior of the National Theater.

She and her family were able to gain release from a Nazi concentration camp during WWII, remaining in hiding for the remainder of the war. During the Soviet occupation of the late 1960s, she and her husband were able to escape to Austria.

Since immigrating to the United States, Mrs. Sever has dedicated all her time to sculpting.She has exhibited in Washington at the Marlboro Gallery, the Art Barn, the Gallery House and the George Meany Center. She has received awards at the National Small Sculpture Competition.

In New York, she exhibited with the Jack Gallery in Soho, Best of Woman art and at juried shows at Pen & Brush. Her originals, as well as her reproductions, can be found in numerous private collections in Europe and the United States. Her bronze relief of one of the founders of the Czechoslovak Republic hangs in the American Embassy in Prague.

—National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library.

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Pic(k) of the Week: one in a weekly series of photos taken (or noted) by me, posted on Saturdays, and often, but not always (as is the case today), with a good fermentable as the subject.