Breast Feeding

James Turnbull envisions the heartbreak of poverty in this scene of a mother nursing her young son, whose will to survive is challenged by the mother’s emaciated physical condition and their dilapidated surroundings. Completed in 1939 at the end of the Great Depression, Turnbull’s gouache and watercolor painting is emblematic of the punishing hardships endured by many Americans during the era’s economic turmoil.