Oil on Canvas painting of Mother and Child by Bernard Pothast, 19th Century

Bernard Pothast was a Belgian-born Dutch painter. His subjects consisted of mothers with their children, using traditional Academic Realism to create portraits of motherhood. Similar to artists like Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch, Pothast used natural light to render his subjects, invigorating each scene with drama and evoking narrative through a sense of passing time. Born on November 30, 1882 in Hal, Belgium he was the son of a Dutch portrait painter, and later studied at both the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and the é;cole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. His works are in the collections of the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, and the Canton Museum of Art in Ohio, among others. He died on February 1, 1966 in Laren, North Holland in the Netherlands.