There’s early pregnancy, with its peculiar secret knowledge of change. More pleasing, I find, is Augustus John’s portrait of his wife Ida, pregnant with her first child in 1901. There’s a pleasure – even a three-way complicity between Augustus, Ida and the viewer – in seeing him take this in. In more recent times, two of the women included here get across the strange flux of pregnancy very powerfully. Saville gave birth to her first child in 2007, drawing herself throughout pregnancy and having herself photographed during the birth.

Source: The Guardian January 31, 2020 12:05 UTC