Chapman, Kansas, native Henry Varnum Poor was one of the most versatile twentieth-century American artists and craftsmen.  A gifted painter and ceramist, Poor was also an accomplished self-taught architect and builder.  Throughout his life Poor designed nearly a dozen houses, studios, and house additions for himself and friends such as the playwright Maxwell Anderson and actors John Houseman and Burgess Meredith.  Poor also made significant contributions to the ceramic arts and to the American mural movement of the 1930s and 1940s.  His 1936 frescoes for the United States Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., are among the major monuments of American mural painting.

The son of a banker and businessman, Poor spent the first decade of his life in Chapman, Kansas.  In 1896 Poor’s family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where he remained until 1905 when he moved to Palo Alto, California, with his older brother and sister.

The figures depicted in Mother and Child are the artist’s sister, Eva Poor Stone, and her son Charles, who, with his wife Vivian, donated Mother and Child and several other paintings by Poor to the K-State permanent collection.

Throughout his career as an artist Poor maintained a relationship with K-State.  In 1936 K-State acquired Poor’s oil painting, Still Life with Wild Helibor, for the permanent collection, one of the earliest acquisitions of a painting for the collection.  Poor’s work was the subject of a number of exhibitions at K-State, including a 1934 exhibition of his oil paintings, drawings, and ceramics in the department of architecture galleries and a 1939 exhibition of his oil paintings and watercolors in Anderson Hall.  In 1967 Poor was honored as one of three artists featured in the Ninth Biennial Exhibition of Regional Art at K-State.