gathering
protection, life, and
goodwill towards all
gathering
feminine power
autonomy
authority
fertility
love
Combines an image of a woman painted by Charles Louis Hinton, cut from the December 1897 McClure's Magazine, with a fragment of Lawren Harris' Algoma Woodlands (1919).
The story
Two pictures meet here: a magazine illustration and an Ontario landscape.
The woman, in a white classical gown with a wreath in her red hair and her arms full of holly, was painted by Charles Louis Hinton (1869–1950), who was born in Ithaca, New York, grew up in England, and trained in New York and Paris before working as an illustrator, painter and muralist. Part of his signature, "Charles Louis", survives at the lower edge. Her picture comes from the December 1897 issue of McClure's Magazine, the New York monthly that a few years later published Ida Tarbell's history of Standard Oil and Lincoln Steffens's exposés of city politics. Hinton went on to teach at the National Academy of Design, and became dean of its school in 1940.
Behind her is a fragment of Lawren Harris's Algoma Woodlands (1919), from the years when Harris was painting the forests of the Algoma district of northern Ontario.
Holly has been brought indoors in midwinter for a very long time. The Romans decorated their homes with it during Saturnalia, their December festival, and Pliny the Elder wrote in the first century that holly planted beside a house or farm protected it from witches and lightning. Because it stays green and bears red berries through the dead of winter, it came to stand for protection, endurance and the promise of renewal. When Christianity spread across Europe the spiny leaves were read as the crown of thorns and the berries as drops of blood, an association kept alive in the carol "The Holly and the Ivy."