Older and Wiser

Take time to celebrate your family on Grandparents Day.

Missouri-born Roger Medearis painted this portrait of his grandmother when he was just twenty-one and was concluding studies with the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton in Kansas City.

Descendant of two Baptist preachers and mother of three more, she was known as "Godly Susan." Medearis would wheel his grandmother, disabled by stroke, up a ramp in his studio, where he made detailed sketches while she sat, often falling asleep. In her left hand she held a lemon because she loved the tangy taste of the fruit.

A committed realist, the artist then made a clay model of the rest of the scene as he imagined it and went into the countryside to sketch the church, stones, trees, and broken pieces of wood.

Painted in egg tempera, the picture is rich with the delicate detail and luminescence characteristic of this medium. Susan's majestic figure rests amid her beloved nature, stalwart as the grand tree behind her, salt of the American earth.

Sadly, Roger Medearis passed away in July, so this feature does double duty. It not only pays tribute to grandparents but also memorializes the great artist himself.

Source: Elizabeth Prelinger. Scenes of American Life: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (New York and Washington, D.C.: Watson-Guptill Publications, in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2001).

Pictured: Roger Medearis, 1920–2001, Godly Susan, 1941, egg tempera on board, 27 5/8 x 23 5/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Roger and Elizabeth Medearis.