M. Frost’s ‘Europa and the Bull’

Europa and the Bull. Painting by Marguerite Frost

Our house was a very, very, very fine house

With 8 cats in the yard,

And a rather unusual painting over the piano.

My mother, Marguerite, made the painting that hung over the piano in the centre (the heart) of our house.  The blues of the ocean waves were favourite colours of hers.  (One year she painted the front door and front steps of our house a brilliant cobalt blue, shocking the neighbours of our conservative neighbourhood.)  In the painting is Zeus, transformed into a white bull, having abducted fair Europa, and he is transporting her across the Aegean Sea to the isle of Crete, to ‘have his way with her’.  In a similar yet very different story, Marguerite crossed the Atlantic Ocean (on a converted troop ship in 1947) to meet my father after two years apart and to decide whether or not to marry him.  At that time, she was the one in control of her destiny. Unlike poor Europa. 

Anyone who looks now at old black and white photographs of my mother as a young woman can see that the painting was a self-portrait.  But at the time that the painting was newly completed and then hung defiantly over the piano, neither my siblings nor I nor the neighbourhood children who came for birthday parties or after-school snacks ever saw the resemblance to the chubby, gentle-eyed mother with her long hair done up in a simple chignon, and dressed (always dressed!) – sometimes in her lime-green and fuchsia-pink sheath dress bought on sale and a whim at Woodward’s. 

Neither image really suited an English professor's wife, but both suited her; perfectly.