It's a beautiful portrait of breastfeeding, and I love the colours and the way the woman is framed by the vines. Poppet wanted to know why there's a pumpkin at the front, but I'm no art historian so we had fun discussing it - "Maybe she's going to make pumpkin soup for tea?"
"Or maybe it's Halloween?"
"Or maybe the artist just wanted to practise painting pumpkins?"
I love the story behind it too. The whereabouts of Martineau’s painting were unknown from the 1930s until about four years ago, when someone inherited it from their grandmother. Having been identified, it was offered to the nation in lieu of inheritance tax, and once accepted by the government, given to the Ashmolean Museum.
A very similar woman wearing identical Neapolitan costume (some people believe it was in fact the same model) features in a painting by William Holman Hunt, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, with whom Martineau shared a studio in the 1850s. There's more about the two paintings here.
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