Mother Earth (The Good Earth- from an article written by the artist)

Born in Vienna, Oskar Gross was expected to follow in his aristocratic father’s career footsteps of engineering and architecture. An artistically inclined child, he shunned store-bought toys, preferring to design his own! As painting was his passion, he attended the prestigious Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, being one of thirty-two accepted from 300 applicants. Portraiture would be his initial career choice and he opened a lucrative practice in Vienna, however rising operation costs forced him to shut down his studio. He spent time in Munich, where he worked as a cartoonist for a comic paper. His career took off when he won an 1898 mural competition for the Hungarian State Pavilion designed for the Paris Exposition of 1900. Interestingly, his plan incorporated Hungarian peasants with horses and he used the color of purple throughout the composition. Two famous Chicago architects—Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan-- happened to be at the Exposition, and impressed with the mural of Gross, invited him to Chicago to decorate buildings. Though reluctant to leave Vienna, Gross and his wife made the trip in 1903 and settled there. He became famous not only for his murals, in such edifices as the New Franklin Building on Dearborn Street and Louis Sullivan’s 1912 Owatonna Bank, in Owatonna, Minnesota, but also had the honor of painting a portrait of General Douglas McArthur. The Chicago Tribune reproduced the work in 1942 and circulated 144,000 buttons with the image created by Gross.

Gross chronicled the inception and process of his masterful work Mother Earth, explaining how he had the idea for over ten years to feature a family tilling the land, ascending a steep slope without the help of oxen. Several waves of inspiration lead up to this masterful piece: the biblical verse from Genesis 3:19 "With the sweat at thy brow, shall thou eat thy daily bread," and his own conviction that "We have to give to the earth what we take from it. We have to till it and that is universal." [The Union League Bulletin, vol xx, no. 5, May 1943, p.18]. Finally, the catalyst to paint the Union League Club work came from his viewing of the 1937 film adaptation of Pearl Buck’s novel the Good Earth. Gross returned to his native Austria for initial sketches, which he made in the Tyrol region near the Brenner Pass. He took these sketches back home to his Chicago studio on 19 East Pearson Street and with the help of sculpted models, staged the composition to complete his masterpiece full of admiration for the farmer and the land. The deeply moving work won the Municipal Art League first purchase prize when shown at the 1940 Annual Chicago Art Institute Juried exhibition.