 Mater, Godella
Mater in the house of St. John
In 1865, Mother Anna Shannon, then vicar in Louisiana, traveled to Paris where she met Pauline Perdrau; Mother Shannon asked the artist to paint in oils two copies of Mater. She agreed and they were sent to New Orleans in the following year. One of them was destined for St. Michael's where it remained until that house closed in 1932; it was then sent to Clifton in Cincinnati and in 1970 found its way to St. Charles. The other copy is now in Grand Coteau.
When the French houses were gradually closed in the first decade of the 20th century, several houses in other European countries received Pauline's paintings. Our house in Padua, Via Belzoni, has an original. Godella has one painted in 1881 at Layrac near Agen, in the Loire region of France (where Pauline wrote the famous Leisure Hours, her account of the lives of Madeleine Sophie and Joséphine Gœtz). In the background you can make out the view from the roof of that ancient Abbey. You can even see a train on a viaduct and some 19th Century castles. At the time of the French expulsions, the furniture of the chapel and house at Layrac were sent to the Godella foundation. And Mater arrived with everything else. During the Spanish Civil War, Mater was hidden in the woods on the school grounds.
Mater in the House of St. John
One of the most interesting representations is entitled Mater in the House of St. John. An account from Spain tells us:
For many years an unpretentious print circulated among us; we could see that this was Mater in her old age, but where had it come from? A book found in the Valle library (Seville) gives us the data to identify it. In 1882, Father Perdrau, Pauline's brother, wrote The Blessed Virgin's Last Years, with an imaginative zest worthy of the apocryphal gospels. His sister painted Mary in her own setting. She was still Mater, but with evident differences: the place, the attitude, the position of the symbols that spoke to so many generations of little girls, Mary's aging features, the darker shades that include both her dress and the evening sky, in contrast with the brightness of the Temple.
“Mother Perdrau is in tune with Mary in all her mysteries, so she naturally wants to live with her in St. John's home at Ephesus.” This was certainly what inspired her desire to paint her last picture: Marie chez l'apôtre bien aimé [Mary in the House of the Beloved Disciple]. She had already thought of it while still in Paris, for the ideal of Mary's last years had long been very dear to her. She had made the first sketch at the rue de Varenne and had even shown it to Mother Goetz, making a gift of it to her superior in 1873.
For some days we saw Mother Perdrau shut in her studio, absolutely forbidding anyone to go in. What's going to come out of there? people were asking. Finally, on May 24th, the secret was revealed. When we came into the community room, we saw the first sketch of this beautiful work, bathed in evening light.
The sincere admirers of the picture urged Mother Perdrau to reproduce it life-size, to complement her first work: Mater Admirabilis of the Trinità. At this time, Father Perdrau was writing his book, Our Lady's Last Years, and he asked that his sister's picture be included in the publication. She had let her brushes lie idle for a long time and could not make up her mind to paint again. And yet she felt that the requests made to her were a sign of God's will… She prayed about it, and during the holidays of 1878 she set to work. The seaside place, Marseilles, where she brought it to completion was exceptional in its light and color and in the richness and variety of nature. The work was finished on the eve of the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows that same year. The members of the Marseilles community were the first to pay homage.
Mother Perdrau's work met with a warm reception in many parts of the Society of the Sacred Heart, but it was a sorrow to her to learn that the superior general, Mother Lehon, did not like it; she could not accept the idea that our Lady aged and declined physically. Pauline's brother asked if our Lady had granted some special grace for representing her at an age at which she is generally unknown. She answered:
Yes, she granted me a simple favor mentioned in the Exercises [of St. Ignatius]. She showed me my final end, almost as clearly as if I saw it by the light of day, and I understood that the only way to unite my heart to the hearts of Jesus and Mary is humility, death to self.
Source of the information: The book, Le peintre de Mater et le chantre de l'Enfant Jésus [The Painter of Mater and the Singer of the Child Jesus], published in 1927, contains all that is officially known about this painting.
Adapted from the Archives Newsletter, No. 25, February 2003.
|
