Baba and Billy (portrait of the artist's daughter, Vivian) 1920

John Duncan painted "Baba and Billy (portrait of the artist's daughter, Vivian)" with oils, capturing a quiet moment, probably in his studio. Just look at the way the paint has been dabbed on, like little soft kisses of color, forming a halo of red-gold hair. The application seems gentle, tentative—the artist feels his way around the form of her face, trying to capture the fleeting innocence of childhood. He must have looked at her and been so overwhelmed with tenderness he struggled to translate it into something solid. Her black cat, Billy, looks like a shadow of the future or maybe a touch of the uncanny that cuts through the otherwise saccharine sweetness of the scene. You can see Duncan’s been looking at earlier Pre-Raphaelite paintings and using this to make something new. Paintings like this always remind me that artists are constantly building on what came before. What they make becomes part of a larger conversation that goes on across generations. It’s less about fixed meanings than about opening up possibilities.