Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Hartley on the Rocking Horse
Alice Neel American
Not on view
Like most female artists of the twentieth century, especially mothers of modest means, Neel never had the benefit of a separate studio: she always worked from home. After she moved to Spanish Harlem in 1938 and began raising two sons, her studio/home started to play an ever more prominent role in her work. Such is true in this painting of her younger son, Hartley. Neel shows herself reflected in the apartment’s mirror seated in front of her easel and painting the very work before us. She represents herself doing double duty, laboring as both an artist and a mother, concretizing a tension she called the "awful dichotomy."
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