Maternity: Images of Motherhood
15 March to 22 June; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Over the last five months, my identity has been usurped by some other woman called Mummy. This strange woman displays the patience I never had, and the ability to survive on a few paltry hours of sleep. On the rare occasion when I have left the house without baby Calum, I have felt an uncanny lightness, a bit like forgetting my handbag, or my clothes.

The rest of the time, we come as a package: mother and child, leaving a cheerful trail of baby-sick through the galleries and museums of Edinburgh. We look forward to leaving our mark this Saturday on the new show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Maternity: Images of Motherhood.

Whatever kind of rumpled image Calum and I project, it bears little relation to the classic art historical notion of mother and child. In the story of European art, the Madonna and child is fundamental. Arising out of Byzantine art, early representations of the Virgin Mary place her in a throne, a regal Christ-child sitting in her lap. The image is, in every sense of the word, iconic.

As the Renaissance approached, a softer version became popular. The Virgin Mary plays with the infant Jesus, at home or in luscious meadows. She is a real, human mother, the text books will tell you, accessible to those who hope she will answer their prayers.

The earliest picture in the exhibition, Botticelli’s celebrated Virgin Adoring The Sleeping Christ Child, sets the scene in a rose garden. Mary looks tenderly at her sleeping babe, a fragrant breeze lifting her veil of purest blue, and no apparent need for a nappy on the Christ-child’s rash-free bottom. Where is the muslin square, I wonder, perched on Mary’s shoulder, and why does the baby never scream?

The answer is, of course, that this image is deeply symbolic, the closed garden representing Mary’s virginity; her pure blue robes, borrowed from the image’s Byzantine fore-runners, a reference to her position as queen of heaven; and the baby’s sleepful state prefiguring his tragic death. “His story is hinted at,” explains Robin Baillie, the Senior Outreach Officer who organised this show. “She’s a real mother but she’s also worshipping him. Every child is a child like Jesus and every mother is a mother like Mary.”

This classic figure has embedded itself in the European psyche as the archetypal image of motherhood, and while other ideologies have come and gone, the glowing Madonna has never sunk far from the surface.

By the 18th century, the role of the aristocratic mother had drifted as far as it would get from this pastoral idyll. This was a time when rich women would farm their babies out to wet nurses and governesses, and put them on display only when they could perform as good little gents and ladies. These portraits boasted of successful dynasties, where a woman’s greatest achievement was to provide her husband with a male heir.

George Romney’s 1778 portrait of Jane Maxwell, Duchess of Gordon, shows her with her eldest child, George. In their hands are old master drawings, a symbol of the family’s cultural inheritance. The Duchess is depicted in full control: she was in fact a powerful hostess in London’s political circles and would later divorce the Duke. However, the key message of the painting is Maxwell’s success as a producer of heirs. “So it’s an image of a mother,” says Baillie, “but it doesn’t say everything about that woman.”

Meanwhile in France, artists of the Rococo period associated motherhood – as they did most other things – with sex. The picture of a perfect mother and child bore more relation to Venus and Cupid than to Mary and Jesus. A sketch by Greuze for The Delights Of Motherhood struck Diderot as uncomfortably erotic. If not for her children, he worried, the subject’s smile would seem voluptuous and her exposed body wanton.

“Nature has given women so much power,” said the droll Dr Samuel Johnson in 1763, “that law has wisely given them little.” It was at this time that the “Cult of Motherhood” was born, elevating the role of women while at the same time ensuring that they obeyed their husbands and didn’t stray from their duties at home.

In the face of industrialisation, and uncomfortable with women’s growing use of contraception, Jean-Jacques Rousseau appealed to mothers to raise their children as nature intended. He resurrected the image of the happy, virtuous mother, devoting her life selflessly to the creation of the next generation. The cult spread, and gradually it became fashionable for wealthy mothers to breastfeed. Art reflected this return to the rural idyll, the peasant woman a great favourite, happily breastfeeding as she was born to do.

Scottish artist Sir William Quiller Orchardson painted such an image in 1859, at the height of Victorian sentimentality. Through The Corn portrays a tired mother struggling through a field at the end of the day, her child on her aching back. Despite her exhaustion, she glows with virginal beauty, at one with the soft browns of the corn.

“You have to believe that the mother can redeem,” explains Baillie, “it’s that essential goodness, and commitment, and loyalty to the child.” He points out an almost imperceptible arch at the top of painting, which brings it back to the religious imagery of the Madonna and Child.

There is no such redemption in William Strang’s 1889 etching, Despair. The Dumbarton-born artist’s bleak vision of motherhood was far removed from Rousseau’s happy fantasy. A woman sits isolated in a stark interior; a baby at her breast, her back hunched, staring grimly ahead of her. For Baillie it is “an anti-Madonna”.

Many women may recognise in Strang’s picture the first few weeks or months of their initiation into motherhood: the lack of sleep, the sudden loss of their previous lives, and the physical entrapment of near-constant nursing. Their expectation of Botticelli’s golden glow is dashed by grinding reality, but they learn not to reveal this to an outside world which still believes in the rosy idyll.

There is a disappointing hole in the exhibition, caused by the omission of Cecile Walton’s Romance, owned by the National Galleries themselves. Painted in Edinburgh in 1920, it depicts Walton stretched out half-naked, having given birth to her second child. The atmosphere is strangely ambiguous, and the image makes reference to historic paintings of prostitutes on the one hand, and the holy family on the other. It is, some suggest, a mourning of the passing of her own independent life; Walton would indeed abandon painting a few years later.

Walton’s powerful image signals a break from the Cult of Motherhood, as society found itself in the grip of a new, technological revolution. Feeding bottles were introduced at the beginning of the 20th century, along with a regimented approach to child-rearing. Women were warned against “smother love”, by a state which was keen to exert discipline on the now scientific project of child-care.

Eduardo Paolozzi made much in his art of the 20th century’s mechanisation of human beings. His collages, both paper and bronze, united biology with machinery to create Frankenstinian monsters, as in his collage of 1946, Maternity. Taking an illustrated sculpture of Queen Victoria, so-called Mother of the Empire, he has replaced her body with a combustion engine.

This brutal visual violence towards the maternal body is echoed in Damien Hirst’s new sculpture, Wretched War. Revisiting a massive bronze which he called The Virgin Mother, he bases his pregnant female on the innocent figure of Degas’s Little Dancer. Unlike Degas’s appealing bronze, Hirst’s is flayed to reveal a foetus inside the female’s womb. When unveiled at London’s Royal Academy in 2006 the work caused a storm of protest. The mother and child – western art history’s oldest icon – still appears to be as sacred as ever.

Contemporary artist, and mother of three, Christine Borland adopts a more typically subtle approach. Long concerned with the forgotten victims of medical research, Borland recovers lost souls from dusty shelves and closed case-books. In this case she has rescued an 18th century birth demonstration model – a leather doll with real foetal skull – and lovingly hand-sewn her own version. What was once a scientific prop now recovers some of its humanity, and placed on a shelf, its pathetic form cries out for motherly love.

Another lost soul will be abandoned on the floor, to be stumbled across by concerned exhibition-goers. Kerry Stewart’s The Only Solution Was To… is a plastic baby in a carrycot, lost like Moses in the rushes. “It brings up the panic and fears that are now associated with looking after children”, says Baillie. “It isn’t a Garden of Eden any more, and one is paranoid about many different things. Stewart has achieved that simply by separating the baby from either parent.”

Baillie points out that of the four women artists represented in the show, three have taken the unusual step of separating the child from the mother. While Borland and Stewart have left babies abandoned, Moyna Flannigan has painted a boy not with his mother, but with his father. “The question is”, Baillie asks, “whether women have always felt a separation and it was covered up, or is that a more selfish, modern, individualistic way of looking at our roles in life?”

Motherhood has definitely got more complicated, as 21st century women are expected to combine Botticelli’s nurturing ideal with our hard-won roles in the workplace, while simultaneously enjoying the lifestyle of a Venus with nothing better to do than bathe and beautify. Having come through the technological revolution, a new Cult of the Mother has begun.

Like Rousseau’s disciples in the 18th and 19th centuries, we are encouraged to return to nature with a new pride in breastfeeding, home-made organic purées and reusable nappies. We aspire once more to be domestic goddesses, emitting a saintly glow of serenity as we nurse our perfectly accessorised cherubs in leafy parks and wholefood cafes.

The Yummy Mummy is the new Madonna, women rushing to mother and baby exercise classes, desperate to lose the pounds as quickly as their babies put them on. Image, more than ever, is everything. “Taking inspiration from our Nursery Interiors Collections,” says this season’s Mamas & Papas catalogue, “indulge in a complete look for your little one with our range of co-ordinating babywear.”

Mamas & Papas don’t do mangers or blue robes, if they did, they would co-ordinate. Our search for maternal perfection is founded upon centuries of painterly hyperbole, reaching farther than we might ever imagine. When Calum was slow to gain weight, my health visitor lamented that he would never be a Titianesque cherub. Life, I have learned the hard way, does not always imitate art.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 09.03.08