By The Curious Scribbler

When not inventing her remarkable goblins, my great-aunt Jet S Jardine painted watercolours in a number of other genres: meticulous still life paintings of flowers in her studio, and plein air landscape scenes in many parts of the British Isles.  She also drew people.   She turned particularly unsentimental  eye on motherhood, as the following pictures show. How very seldom does one see a picture of a furiously screaming toddler, arching its back in the arms of its suffering mother or nanny?

Artwork by Jet S Jardine

In another picture a lady in a green jacket holds a scarcely clad baby at arms length, viewing it with contemplative distaste.  One feels she will be glad to relinquish it to other hands.

Artwork by Jet S Jardine

Jet Jardine was born a Victorian in 1881  and studied for at least seven years at the Glasgow School of Art.  In 1920 she and her sister Aeta moved to London where they lived frugally through a period of great social change.  It was in London that she painted a picture entitled ‘Thoroughly Modern Ma’.  The young mother slouches in trousers, smokes a cigarette, and  pushes her child in a small bassinette, quite unlike the grand Silver Cross prams of establishment babies.  Even the cat on the fence looks appalled.

Thoroughly Modern Ma
by J S Jardine

Jet’s younger sister Aeta J Jardine also painted all her lifetime, and sold many beautifully composed landscape views.  As  a young woman she drew people, but with a far gentler perspective.  A prolonged stay in Trinidad, West Indies with their brother Warburton’s family in 1909 yielded a sketchbook replete with her drawings of family life.

1908 sketch by Aeta J Jardine

1908 sketch by Aeta J Jardine

Aeta humorously depicted her sister’s detachment when on babysitting duties for her young nephews, a role which she designated ” very unsuitable”.

1908 sketch by Aeta J Jardine

Neither Jet or Aeta ever married and I suspect that the twin boy babies drawn by Aeta were later mutated into Jet’s goblins.  (see previous blog) Jet developed her social commentary genre of paintings during their years in London while Aeta concentrated of landscapes and never repeated the style of her family sketch book in later life.  The sisters died in Brighton in the 1960s.