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Girl with Pomegranates

1938
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 910
Waring was a painter and graphic artist who illustrated several early covers of the NAACP’s Crisis magazine. Her portrayals of Black women across the social spectrum solidified her stature as the foremost Black female painter of the Harlem Renaissance. Here, while the visage of the unnamed sitter is captured with portraitlike specificity, her dress is more loosely sketched. The backdrop veils a landscape propped against the wall, possibly inspired by the artist’s travels in the south of France. Waring’s careful attention to the rendering of two pomegranates points to the fruit’s multivalent symbolism as an emblem of prosperity, fertility, and sensuality in Greek myth and ancient Egyptian texts. It also appears in paintings by other Harlem Renaissance artists and in the writings of Zora Neale Hurston.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Girl with Pomegranates
  • Artist: Laura Wheeler Waring (American, Hartford, Connecticut 1887–1948 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
  • Date: 1938
  • Medium: Oil on canvas
  • Dimensions: 36 1/4 × 30 3/16 × 3/4 in. (92.1 × 76.7 × 1.9 cm)
  • Classification: Paintings
  • Credit Line: Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace and the Ford Foundation Gifts, Florence and Herbert Irving Acquisitions Fund, and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 2024
  • Object Number: 2024.618
  • Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art

More Artwork

More Artwork
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Girl in Pink Dress, Laura Wheeler Waring American, Oil on canvas
Girl in Pink Dress
Laura Wheeler Waring
ca. 1927
Africa in America, cover of The Crisis 28, no. 2, Laura Wheeler Waring American, Ink on paper
Returned to lender
Africa in America, cover of The Crisis 28, no. 2
Laura Wheeler Waring
June 1924
The Strength of Africa, cover of The Crisis 28, no. 5, Laura Wheeler Waring American, Ink on paper
Returned to lender
The Strength of Africa, cover of The Crisis 28, no. 5
Laura Wheeler Waring
September 1924
Egypt and Spring, cover of The Crisis 25, no. 6, Laura Wheeler Waring American, Ink on paper
Returned to lender
Egypt and Spring, cover of The Crisis 25, no. 6
Laura Wheeler Waring
April 1923
Black Abstraction, Georgia O'Keeffe American, Oil on canvas
Black Abstraction
Georgia O'Keeffe
1927

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