Description
A painting commissioned as a surprise gift from a husband to his wife on the imminent birth of their first child, a daughter. The theme: William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, set in a 1930’s Missouri flood scene, where I was asked to highlight the “embodiment of compassion”—a facet the husband relayed as “his wife’s most noteworthy trait.” In Shakespeare’s play, in Act V, scene I, Miranda utters the famous line with delight and surprise: “O brave new world, that has such people in’t!” She says this when she first sees the survivors of the tempest, and it is significant because it reveals Miranda’s innocent and optimistic view of humanity, unaware of their flaws and complexities.
