04-07-2025
Breastfeeding Welcome At Yale Center For British Art
Lady Mary Boyle Nursing her Son Charles, 1690
Health is rarely discussed at art museums. The Yale Center for British Art, which reopened last month, made no mention in the press for the new Tracey Emin show about her battles with alcoholism, smoking, and subsequent bladder cancer. The beautiful brutality architecture of Louis Kahn that defines the building is not discussed in tandem with his unglamorous death at the Penn Station bathroom. Rather, art is often an escape from the ugly realities of life, or perhaps a macabre study of them without reverence. Breastfeeding in art is hardly a major element of either category.
Depictions of breastfeeding in Western art are usually associated with the baby Jesus and Mary, apart from others in gilded deification. Portraits of upper class women with their children are often straight and even a bit stern. But Yale Center for British Art made a bold choice with their reopening, to dedicate a full wall to the hyperrealistic portrait of Irish noblewoman Lady Mary Boyle with a child at her breast.
Lady Boyle gazes bravely at the viewer, unashamed.
Sir Godfrey Kneller painted Lady Mary and the infant Charles in defiance. Culturally, the gallery label explains, upper class women in Britain were discouraged from nursing their own children in the 17th century. Instead, hiring an appropriate wet nurse with both cleanliness of hygiene and character was the norm. That Lady Mary chose not only to nurse her three children, but be depicted facing the frame with sincere exhaustion, is a powerful commentary on womanhood.
Historians argue that perhaps it was Boyle's mixed Irish-English origins that encouraged variant iconography of Catholicism and Protestantism in the image. Other imagery of breastfeeding at the Yale Center for British Art is namely Joseph Wright of Derby's The Dead Soldier, on view in the Long Gallery.
FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™
Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase
Pinpoint By Linkedin
Guess The Category
Queens By Linkedin
Crown Each Region
Crossclimb By Linkedin
Unlock A Trivia Ladder
The far right corner of the Long gallery features a dramatic scene with a nursing woman, all but ... More obfuscated by the surrounding scenes.
In a contemporary context, intense pressure on breastfeeding in the United States is coupled with equal cultural pressure to avoid breastfeeding in public. American pediatricians count the number of ounces of milk and feeds per day, discourage night feedings and push to wean mainly to infant formula by the first birthday, even as the World Health Organization recommends two years or beyond.
La Leche League, in contrast, is adamantly pro-breastfeeding. Everything from mood regulation, antibodies, and even dental care is attributed to the practice, with some women often eluding cultural norms to maintain nursing well past age four.
Perhaps Mary Boyle would be one of those women today. As this 17th century work suggests, women's and infant health are ever-evolving realms. Infant mortality is still at nearly nine percent in Mississippi, for instance, believed to be linked to a variety of factors such as birth defects and maternal health complications.
The museum does not use this work as a discussion point per se, but welcomes children and mothers to the space with its hanging. For all the treasures on campus, this one reminds us of the artwork most priceless: life itself.
