Although it’s too early to assess the influence Lauren Ford (1891-1973) had on the art of her time, it is possible to identify some of the parameters of her art that define its place in the twentieth century and that explain its continuing appeal today.Life Magazine in 1944 was correct in recognizing that Lauren Ford, a convert to Catholicism, had no equal in the United States as a painter of religious subjects.
Like Edward Hicks, the nineteenth century Quaker painter famous for his many renderings of The Peaceable Kingdom, Lauren Ford’s art sprang from an inner life, and she was inspired by his pictures.But unlike Hicks, Lauren Ford’s designs were the result of academic and avant-garde training, contemporary influence, and medieval art.Lauren Ford grew up with the modern movements in France, apprenticing to her uncle Lauren, her namesake, when she was nine years old.She also shared a vision of the American countryside with the leading regionalists of the 1930s: Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry.Lauren Ford’s unique way of humanizing her religious themes within a regional context give her pictures the compelling spirit that continues to attract people of all ages. Lauren Ford’s niece, Jane Dore Nestler, analyzing that attraction, wrote, We are drawn to her works…by the appeal of the innocence and the beauty of simple creatures. It was Lauren Ford’s love and respect for all created things that was the underlying principle and source of her art.