Barbara Loftus (b. England - Lives Brighton, England)
The Grandparents Visit, 2020-2022
Oil on canvas
213 x 152 cm
The Artist’s Collection
© Barbara Loftus
Second generation German-Jewish émigrée
The artist’s mother, Hildegard, born into a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany was the family’s sole survivor of the Holocaust. She fled to England in 1939, where she kept her memories secret until late in life. Following the revelations of her mother's testimony, Loftus has spent 25 years researching the lost world of her German-Jewish inheritance. In this sequence of three works (part of a larger series), she has reconstructed the aura of the home life of the family she never knew.
The Grandparents’ Visit fabricates a detailed interior typical of a comfortable, respectable, middle-class German household prior to the Second World War. The grandparents and granddaughter (the artist’s mother) all face outward as if posing for a photograph: they are well-dressed, but not ostentatiously so, although the grandfather’s handkerchief seems to have been arranged with a slight flourish and the granddaughter’s hair is dressed in a large bow which, together with her neat, matching dress suggests she has been suitably attired to receive visitors. A maid, shown in profile, busy with a minor task at the table, is less defined, a less tangible presence than the others, who are shown at leisure: the grandmother holds a pug across her lap; the grandchild shows a book, perhaps a little self-consciously, to her grandfather.
In the background we see objects typical of such a household: china ornaments on a cabinet, a framed picture, an elaborate light fitting, and solid, comfortable seating, all indicative of and supporting the solid framework of these similarly comfortable and respectable lives.
