A Father’s Day Edition
- Diamond Zhou
- Jun 13
- 17 min read
Updated: Jul 2
welcome to our
SATURDAY EVENING POST
Dedicated to Sunday, June 15th, 2025
We all have fathers. And even when life denies us their daily presence, or presence at all, most of us have known a father figure — that steady force who, in quiet ways or with unmistakable strength, showed us how to stand upright in the world. Fathers are often our first guides to courage and conscience: they discipline us not to diminish us but to forge in us the backbone of decency. They lend shoulders broad enough to carry burdens we cannot yet bear alone. Unlike mothers’ nurturing warmth, a father’s energy is often described as the anchor: level-headed, protective, resolute, a quiet promise that the storms will pass and this house will stand.
The truest fathers are not defined by blood, but by presence. They show up, again and again: for scraped knees and difficult lessons, for late-night talks and unspoken worries. They lend not just an ear, but a solution; not just advice, but the calm courage to face what must be faced. And as we grow older, fathers evolve too: from guardians and rule-keepers to friends, co-conspirators, and wise confidants who remind us, by example, that integrity and responsibility are the foundation of any household worth calling home.
Today, as we look at how artists have celebrated fathers and fatherhood, may we honour not only the men who raised us but also the enduring, often unsung truths they stand for: that to father is to protect, to teach, to steady the ship — and above all, to love without condition.
Although a biblical scene of divine creation, this iconic fresco doubles as the ultimate portrayal of a father-son relationship: the moment God the Father gives life to Adam. Against the grand curvature of the Sistine Ceiling, Michelangelo paints a bearded, majestic God stretching out his hand to impart the spark of life from his own finger into Adam’s hand. Their index fingers nearly touch in an electrifying gap, often interpreted as the threshold between God’s perfection and man’s reach.
The fresco’s palette of soft fleshtones against an architectural sky makes the encounter both otherworldly and deeply human. Even without a literal father and child, viewers emotionally register the scene as a paternal embrace suspended in time. The “finger of the paternal right hand”, a phrase from a medieval hymn Michelangelo knew, is here the conduit of life.
The Florentine banker Francesco Sassetti is portrayed with his young son Teodoro, offering a rare Renaissance glimpse of fatherhood. Ghirlandaio paints the boy in profile, a pose of purity, looking up as if to seek his father’s attention, while Sassetti’s gaze drifts pensively outward. This subtle disconnect, highlighted by the father’s composed, frontal stance and the child’s eager profile, poignantly captures a universal emotional dynamic: the child yearns for engagement as the parent, weighed by worldly concerns, momentarily withdraws. Yet, the intimacy of their physical closeness and the tender rendering of the boy’s clasped hands convey familial affection. In a time when children were often depicted as miniature adults, Ghirlandaio’s sensitive detailing of Teodoro’s trusting expression and the gentle, almost protective positioning of the father’s arm reflect a nuanced appreciation of the father-son bond – affectionate, if a bit formal. The painting, essentially a dynastic portrait, doubles as an early narrative of paternal responsibility and the continuity of family lines in 15th-century Florence.
Widely hailed as one of the most psychologically profound works in Western painting, Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son stands as an enduring symbolism to fatherhood at its most merciful and redemptive. Painted near the end of Rembrandt’s turbulent life, a period marked by personal loss, financial ruin, and spiritual searching, the monumental canvas captures the climactic moment from the Gospel of Luke: the wayward son, ragged and broken by his own folly, collapses at his father’s feet. But instead of anger or scorn, the father leans over him, hands broad and tender upon his back, eyes heavy with compassion and relief. Scholars often note the father’s mismatched hands — one firm and masculine, the other gentle and almost maternal — suggesting a love that combines strength and forgiveness in equal measure. Beyond its biblical roots, this painting reads like Rembrandt’s personal confession: a man who knew ruin and regret, imagining the solace of unconditional paternal welcome.
A father has just returned home to the welcoming arms of his children in this intimate, quietly moving scene by Daumier. In the dim, brown-toned interior, a bearded working-class father bends down to press a kiss on his baby’s cheek, cradling the child gently. Beside them, his older daughter stretches her little arms upward, either to hug her father or to hold the baby, yearning to be included in the affection.
Daumier, often known for satire and social critique, here sheds irony to present a slice of everyday tenderness. We sense the father’s fatigue in the slight slump of his shoulders, yet his face radiates contentment. The psychological insight is touching: there is no mother in view, highlighting the father’s solo interaction and capability as a nurturer, which was notable for the mid-19th century. The Kiss validates the idea that a father’s love is as gentle and essential as a mother’s. Daumier, with compassionate economy, presents a father not as a distant authority figure but as a source of comfort and affection.
In this scroll, Katsushika Hokusai — Japan’s legendary printmaker famed for The Great Wave — turns his brush to Confucian virtue made flesh and claw. Drawn from the Classic of Filial Piety, the scene flips the familiar script of paternal guardianship: here, the boy, Yang Hsiang, only fourteen, hurls himself at a ferocious tiger to save his helpless father from certain death. In Edo Japan, such tales were moral cornerstones, teaching that loyalty to family mirrored loyalty to the state. Hokusai’s rendition brims with coiled energy, ink and colour sweep fiercely to capture fur, muscle, and a child’s desperate courage.
In this intimate portrait, Edgar Degas captures a tender moment of fatherly reverie within his own household. Painted between 1869 and 1870, the scene pairs two men: the Spanish tenor Lorenzo Pagans, guitar in hand, caught mid-performance, and Degas’ aging father, seated nearby, lost in quiet contemplation as music fills the domestic space. The relationship is gentle yet profound: Pagans’ poised fingers suggest sound and vitality, while the elder Degas’s soft, almost wistful gaze reveals a father savouring both melody and memory. This painting resonates beyond its refined surfaces: it is the portrait of a son’s gratitude, immortalising a father’s small, private pleasure: the simple, unspoken bond of being known and cherished through art and music.
The photographs Arnold Genthe captured of San Francisco’s Chinatown are the only surviving visual record of the historic neighborhood before the devastating 1906 earthquake. While invaluable today as documentary evidence, Genthe’s images are undeniably filtered through the lens of an outsider observing a segregated community at a time when Chinese residents faced widespread, often violent discrimination and were denied the right to U.S. citizenship. Working discreetly with a small portable camera, Genthe often photographed his subjects without their knowledge and deliberately cropped his prints to remove signs of Western influence, like English-language signage. In doing so, he reinforced the exoticized and stereotypical portrayal of Chinatown that prevailed in the popular imagination of the period.
Henry Mosler, drawing on his own experience as a German-Jewish immigrant, renders moving houses as a pivotal family ritual. The father—center stage—slices bread for his children in a warmly lit room scattered with boxes, a stove, and a scrubbing board, symbolizing both upheaval and nurturing. Mosler’s radiant palette and precise genre detail reflect his Düsseldorf training, while the scene pulsates with hope for a new urban life. Painted just after his own marriage and the birth of his first child, Just Moved becomes quietly autobiographical: fathers not only guide, but also feed and anchor their families through transitions shaped by migration and promise.
Against the backdrop of a simple farmyard, a humble cottage, a stack of straw, and the open sky, a touching scene unfolds: a father bends down with arms outstretched to catch his toddler’s first steps. The child, encouraged from behind by its mother, toddles forward with tiny eager strides, arms reaching out to the father.
Van Gogh painted this work during his stay at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, using a black-and-white print of a composition by Jean-François Millet as inspiration. In translating Millet’s image into his own vibrant colour and vigorous brushstroke, Van Gogh also translated it into an intensely personal statement of hope and familial yearning. What makes First Steps especially poignant is knowing Van Gogh’s own life at that moment: he was isolated, recovering, childless, and hungering for familial connection (his letters mention his longing for family warmth). Through this image, he seems to vicariously partake in a moment of pure parental joy. The emotional center is that invisible line of anticipation between father and child; in that gap, all trust and encouragement exist. The father’s face is not detailed, but his body language – leaning forward, stable – exudes love and reassurance.
An elegant, reserved portrait of a dignified gentleman—Huntington’s father, a theologian. His calm expression, scholarly pose, and modest attire speak of moral responsibility and civic duty. It’s a quiet declaration: fatherhood can be spiritual gravitas rather than public flamboyance.
In this deeply personal work painted just three years before her death, Frida Kahlo pays homage to her father, Guillermo Kahlo. The portrait is bust-length, with Frida’s father depicted against a plain, burnished background that recalls an old studio photograph. Around the margins of the painting, Frida included an inscription (in carefully lettered Spanish) dedicating the portrait to her father and listing his virtues: “artist, photographer, of kindly character, intelligent, and fine… brave, having suffered epilepsy for 60 years but never stopped working…” Guillermo Kahlo was a professional photographer, and in a loving nod, Frida paints him with a camera (a hefty early 20th-century model). This camera is almost as central as his face; it symbolises not only his profession but also how Frida saw him: as the origin of her artistic eye.
This straightforwardness is a mark of respect; she did not subject her father to the symbolic or ex-voto style she used for her own image, instead she preserved his image as he was. The emotional effect of this painting is one of profound love and gratitude. Knowing Frida’s life, beset by health issues, stormy marriage, unable to have children, one can surmise that her father’s unwavering support (he taught her photography, encouraged her during her long medical recovery) was a bedrock for her.
The Thankful Poor stands as one of the most significant and quietly revolutionary depictions of Black fatherhood and intergenerational faith in American art. Painted in 1894, Tanner’s intimate genre scene shows an elderly man, perhaps a grandfather, and a young boy, seated at a humble table, their heads bowed in prayer before a simple meal. Inspired by photographs Tanner took in the rural South and shaped by the moral clarity instilled by his father, Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tanner of the AME Church, the painting counters the crude caricatures so common in late 19th-century portrayals of African Americans.
Here, fatherhood, or grandfatherhood, is not defined by grand gestures but by the quiet passing down of dignity, gratitude, and spiritual grounding. The boy mirrors his elder’s prayerful pose, absorbing a lesson deeper than words: that thankfulness is a strength, and faith a shield against hardship. Light streams in through a sheer-curtained window, bathing the figures in a gentle glow that elevates this modest domestic ritual into something sacred and enduring. The Thankful Poor reminds us that true fathers and father figures do not merely provide, they shape character, model resilience, and anchor the next generation with quiet acts of love and reverence.
Captured by James Karales, a trusted photojournalist of the Civil Rights era, this tender portrait freezes a private moment of one of the most public fathers of the twentieth century: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1962, on the front lawn of his Atlanta home, Dr. King lifts young Martin Luther King III high above his head until father and son touch foreheads, giggling and close, framed by peeling clapboards and an ordinary patch of Southern grass. The scene is deceptively simple: a father at play. Yet beneath this sweetness lies a profound human truth — that even a man burdened daily by the weight of racial justice, threats, and global expectation still carried his son skyward in a gesture of pure, unguarded love. Karales’s lens reminds us that for King, fatherhood was not separate from his dream but at its very core: he wanted his own child, and every child, to live free of the suffocating air of hate. This photograph speaks not only of a father’s delight but of a promise: that the work of lifting up the next generation is both our most ordinary duty and our greatest legacy.
In this stark yet deeply humane image, Dorothea Lange, a giant of Social Realism, freezes a fleeting moment of tenderness in the harshest of contexts: wartime Japanese American internment. Taken at Manzanar Relocation Center in 1942, the photograph shows an elderly grandfather lifting his young grandson high onto his shoulders, silhouetted against a wide, indifferent sky. Amid the fences, barracks, and civil rights suspensions of internment, this simple act becomes quietly radical: a gesture of protection and continuity that refuses to be extinguished by suspicion and forced exile.
Painted in Paris at the height of his Metaphysical period, The Painter’s Family distills Giorgio de Chirico’s obsession with the uncanny and the timeless into a cryptic portrait of familial ties. Here, fatherhood is an enigma: mannequin-like figures stand in a shallow, stage-like space tinted with warm, brick-red tones. The central figure, muscular yet faceless, clutches an assemblage of architectural fragments, perhaps a symbolic child, or the artist’s own burden of legacy and memory. Behind, a ghostly second figure looms, echoing the past or an ancestral presence. De Chirico’s sparse props, a partial canvas, fragments of classical ruins, remind us that for him, family and artistic lineage blur into one perpetual puzzle. Rather than sentimental affection, the painting explores the idea of inheritance and identity: how the artist, like a father, constructs new worlds from pieces of the old.
In Breaking Home Ties, Rockwell captures with photographic clarity and narrative genius the bittersweet moment a father and son part ways. The two sit side by side on the running board of an old farm truck, waiting for the train that will take the son away to college. The composition leads the eye from the son’s shiny optimism (his suitcase, the vibrant pennant) to the father’s muted sorrow (his slumped posture, calloused hands). The father’s hunched shoulders and working outfit speak volumes: he’s a man who has worked hard, sacrificed, and now must send off his best hope. Rockwell famously used models and photographed them for precision.
It was a cover for The Saturday Evening Post, and it resonated deeply in an America experiencing post-war transitions, where many fathers who had not had the chance for higher education were proudly, yet wistfully, enabling their sons to pursue broader horizons. Breaking Home Ties is a poignant reminder of those critical junctures in a father’s life - when love means letting go. It honours the often quiet, stoic way fathers express love: not with tears or dramatic gestures, but with a steady presence, a careful packing of the trunk, a handshake or pat on the shoulder that contains a world of feeling. Rockwell’s scene is specific – 1950s rural America – but it’s timeless and universal in sentiment. Every father who has waved a child off to college, to marriage, or to a new city knows the cloud of emotions under the brave face. And every child, in turn, at some point sees their dad in that new light: a bit lonely without them, immensely proud, and profoundly loving. Rockwell, often dismissed as merely sentimental, here achieves true sentiment: an authentic portrayal of love in transition.
In this quietly luminous double portrait, Mary Cassatt, famed for her tender portrayals of women and children, turns the Impressionist eye toward the men of her own family. Alexander J. Cassatt, her elder brother and a prominent railroad executive, sits composed yet subtly distant, his eyes gazing away as if caught in a private reverie. Beside him, young Robert Kelso Cassatt leans in close, angled protectively toward his father, embodying that childhood certainty that a father’s nearness means safety.
In elegant black-and-white, a father combs his son’s hair in the midst of Central Park—an intimate gesture amid public space. Papageorge captures a fleeting domestic act and immortalizes it as a quiet landmark. It’s a photograph that says: fatherhood is often felt in small, almost invisible rituals.
The Ukrainian Pioneer is William Kurelek’s epic, deeply personal tribute to the saga of Ukrainian settlement in Canada — and within that sweeping historical arc lies an homage to his own father’s legacy. Painted after Kurelek’s formative journey to Ukraine in 1970, the six-panelled narrative moves from Old World poverty (a barefoot peasant child braving snow to beg for food) to New World triumph: in this final panel, Kurelek’s “wheat king” father stands waist-deep in a ripe prairie harvest, embodying the immigrant dream fulfilled. Yet, true to Kurelek’s complex vision, this prosperity is tinged with unease, each idyllic panel shares the ominous presence of a distant atomic mushroom cloud, hinting at fragility beneath hard-won security. Kurelek’s fusion of folk-art detail and psychological symbolism makes this not just social history but intimate family testament: a son’s tribute to the grit and sacrifice of a father who carved abundance from hardship. The Ukrainian Pioneer reminds us that many fathers’ legacies are measured not in affectionate words but in the furrows they ploughed and the futures they dared to plant. Kurelek’s brush preserves that intergenerational inheritance, both proud and precarious, for all to witness.
Father is a towering portrait that confronts the viewer with the rugged, unidealized face of a Chinese peasant in extraordinary detail. Painted in 1980, just after China’s Cultural Revolution, Luo Zhongli’s work signaled a turning point in Chinese art towards realism and the validation of ordinary people’s lives. The canvas is larger than life, and so is the presence of the man depicted. We see his face up close – every deep wrinkle, every weather-beaten crevice of his skin rendered with hyperrealistic precision. His cheeks are sunken, teeth barely visible between slightly parted lips, a sparse peppering of stubble on his chin. He wears a simple cloth cap and holds a porcelain rice bowl up to his mouth, as if caught in the middle of taking a meal. The bowl is chipped, and a crude wooden spoon rests in it – signs of poverty and a hard life.
Importantly, Luo titled this portrait Father, not “Peasant” or “Old Man.” While it’s not literally his own father, the title universalises the image: this is a father, representative of the generation that toiled and sacrificed for their children and nation. In 1980, this painting astonished audiences, not only for its technical virtuosity but for its humanising force. It was a bold departure from the propaganda depictions of idealised workers, instead, Luo presents a father with uncompromising honesty and implicit respect. One can almost feel the grit on the man’s face, the fatigue in his eyes, it is a face of someone who has endured, who has given his strength to feed his family. Father serves as a monumental tribute to the often unseen, underappreciated fathers – the ones with calloused hands and lined faces who quietly bear the burdens to give their children a better life.
Vest No. 2 is more than an etching of an empty garment, it’s an imprint of loss, memory, and the tender remains of a father’s presence. In 1970, Montreal artist Betty Goodwin revolutionized printmaking by literally pressing real vests through an etching press, capturing their creases, hollows, and ghostly contours with haunting intimacy. Critics immediately saw in these works a simple yet powerful formal elegance, but for Goodwin the image struck a deeper chord: her father, whom she lost as a child, had been a vest maker. That revelation flooded the series with poignant personal resonance. The garment becomes both shield and absence — a shell that once held a body, now holding only space. As Goodwin herself put it, “a successful work is the image of our being.” Vest No. 2 stands as an elegy for paternal touch long gone yet invisibly stitched into who we become. It reminds us that sometimes fatherhood endures not in flesh but in the faint impression left behind, pressed into the fabric of our memory and, in Goodwin’s case, into the very plate of her art.
In Another World Is Possible, Sam Durant, who is known for his politically charged interventions, pauses the grand stage of public dissent to muse on the soft revolution happening right under his roof: fatherhood. Installed in Belgium’s Cultuurcentrum Strombeek, the work is part of a larger portfolio exploring how artists reckon with the ordinary yet seismic role of raising children. For Durant, being a father means living daily proof that parallel universes can be imagined — and sometimes finger-painted. He’s described how his child’s spontaneous watercolors, taped up beside his own more deliberate practice, remind him that art can be a playground, not just a protest. Another World Is Possible echoes this domestic insight on a civic scale, asking: if our children’s unruly drawings can co-exist with Rothko, why can’t their sense of wonder reshape our broken world?
In Awakening, Agnes Pelton, a mystic of the American modernist movement, transforms the desert into a dreamscape that quietly memorializes her father. At first glance, the painting glows with cosmic symbolism: a golden trumpet heralds light in the sky while stars twinkle to the left, suggesting spiritual rebirth. But the true key lies below — the distant purple and brown mountains subtly trace the silhouette of Pelton’s father’s face. Orphaned young and marked by family loss, Pelton often sought transcendence through abstracted landscapes. Here, the land itself becomes paternal: a firm yet ethereal presence watching over the flowering inner world she paints. It’s not a portrait in flesh, but a vision of fatherhood embedded in nature’s contours. Awakening reminds us how parents can shape the terrain of our psyche long after they’re gone, appearing quietly at the horizon of memory and imagination — silent guardians of our spiritual dawn.
UPCOMING EXHIBITION
TONY ROBINS: FLOWERS OF RESISTANCE
Opening Saturday, June 21st, 1:00 - 5:30 PM with artist in attendance.
Catalogues are currently available.
