Jacob Lawrence, an African American artist trained in New York City at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, was one of the few painters of his generation who grew up in the black community and was taught primarily by black artists; his primary teacher was Charles Alston at the Harlem Art Workshop. A Social Realist painter early in his career, Lawrence found the subjects for much of his work in black history and in observations of daily life.
The Birth is a Depression-era image set in a Harlem tenement. A man rests his head on a pregnant woman's protruding stomach, while another male figure appears to be assisting in the birth of her baby. Unconcerned with the impending event, the figure on the right prepares to leave the apartment. Lawrence presents an intimate but unsentimental picture of poverty and overcrowded conditions in the slums. Painted in 1938 when he was just twenty-one years old, The Birth was created in the same year in which Lawrence completed the forty-one paintings of the Toussaint L'Ouverture series, his famous pictorial history of the Haitian revolution, which in 1804 established the first black republic in the western hemisphere.
If at times my productions do not express the conventionally beautiful, there is always an effort to express the universal beauty of man's continuous struggle to lift his social position and to add dimension to his spiritual being.
-Jacob Lawrence, 1984
