In A Young Mother, Bessie Potter Vonnoh recast a traditional subject into a modern, lively composition of a woman and child. Impressionist in finish, the sculpture’s surfaces are suggestive and earthy rather than detailed and polished. The woman’s slender features and the lines of her dressing gown evoke a contemporary sitter yet, rather than a portrait, the work offers a broader interpretation of maternal affection.

Raised and trained in Chicago, Vonnoh set up a studio in the city in the mid-1890s, garnering wide acclaim for her sculptures of female figures, whose small scale suited domestic spaces.