Sir Winston Churchill gave this painting to Wendy Reves on the occasion of their second meeting. Sir Winston was gifted with a marvelous sense of humor and saw in the two large trees a fight over the small one in the center. The Custody of the Child was his name for this fight, as he imagined it.

"I know of nothing," wrote Sir Winston Churchill in his essay Painting as a Pastime, "which more entirely absorbs the mind." Landscape was a particularly satisfying subject for him. "The whole world is open with all its treasures. The simplest objects have their beauty. Every garden presents innumerable fascinating problems.

Sir Winston Churchill executed this painting in the dining room of Villa La Pausa, one of his favorite places to paint. It was copied from a book on Paul Cézanne, also in the Reves Collection.

DMA label copy

From 1879 Edouard Manet was plagued with a disease of the legs that eventually rendered him an invalid and resulted in his death. Hydrotherapy treatments did little to arrest the course of his affliction, but Manet's spirits never flagged, and in his last years he amused himself with painting small oils, watercolors, and pastels, visiting with friends, and writing illustrated letters.

The subject of this portrait is probably Jeronimus Deutz, one of the three sons of a wealthy family of Flemish fabric merchants who visited Rome in the 1640s. While there, they commissioned portraits from their countryman Michael Sweerts, a versatile painter of portraits, historical subjects, and low-life genre scenes.

Around the Core is consonant with Paul Klee's work both thematically and formally. A single line spins inward towards the teardrop shaped kernel and then coils outward again creating a sense of movement. Klee's image  depicts at once a galaxy and a core of a fruit. Themes of genesis, growth, and gestation are recurrent in the artist's work.