There is nothing more heart-warming than homey intimate scenes of a mother and her child, amplifying a mother’s love and a child’s innocence. Here, two mothers have their hands full with their three clingy children, all in the buff. Those days, there were no diapers nor was there such a need as it was easier to wash their backsides. There is no time for a tete a tete as their insistent children want to be pampered, carried or hugged, and the mothers happily oblige. The Mother-and-Child theme was a favourite of batik-art progenitor Dato’ Chuah Thean Teng as he himself had fond memories of his own mother, and creating batik masterpieces of the theme was his way of paying tribute to the fabled love, care and sacrifices of mother, as well as a moment of remembrance. One such work, Two Of A Kind, was featured by UNICEF in its greeting card in 1968 (he had another in 1987, titled Tell You A Secret). Dato’ Chuah Thean Teng is a legend for his teeming imagination in his repertoire of batik art he invented in 1953, and invested it with different styles and techniques over the years. He was hailed by Professor Michael Sullivan as the ‘Father of Batik Painting’ (Chinese Art In The 20th Century, 1959). He was honoured with a Retrospective by the National Art Gallery (NAG), Kuala Lumpur, in 1965, and another by the Penang State Art Gallery in 1994. The NAG organised his Memorial exhibition in 2008. The Penang State Government bestowed him the ‘Dato’ title in 1998, and the ‘Living Heritage Award’ in 2005. On the occasion of the Silver Jubilee of the coronation of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II in 1977, he was invited for the Commonwealth Artists of Fame exhibition in London, after an exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute in London in 1959. His first overseas solo was in the United States in 1964. Born in China, where he had a short incomplete art tutelage at the Xiamen (Amoy) Art Institute, he settled in Penang in 1926, after a brief visit when aged 7. During the Japanese Occupation, he made political woodcuts under the pseudonym Choo Ting, but all had been destroyed. He set up the Yahong Art Gallery in 1953 and moved it to its present lot in Batu Ferringhi in 1974.