Mother Playing with Her Child

Underglaze-painted porcelain. The backrest of the mother’s chair, which stands on arched legs, is curved and hugs her body. Her hair is braided into a wreath, she leans back softly in her chair, with her hands clasped over the clenched fists of her squatting son, as they rest their gaze on each other’s faces. The statuette captures the relationship between mother and child in a genre-like scene, which owes its intimacy to the intertwining arms and gazes, and the muted, pastel colouring.
The porcelain statuette was made in Denmark, at the Bing & Grøndahl factory in Copenhagen, founded on 15 April 1853 by Frederick Vilhelm Grøndahl (1816–1857), a figure maker of the Royal Danish Porcelain Factory, and brothers Meyer Hermann Bing (1807–1883), a bookseller, and Jacob Hermann Bing (1811–1896), an art dealer.
The statuette of a mother playing with her child was designed by the Danish artist Inegborg Plockross Irminger (1872–1962), who studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1893, and was employed at the Bing & Grøndahl porcelain factory from 1898 to 1925. Her designs, executed in a factory, depicted mothers with their children, children with pets or engaged in various activities.