Photography played an important role in George Rodrigue’s painting process. The artist often used photographs as a basis for his paintings. This painting, Grandmère, was inspired by a photograph of Rodrigue’s mother, Marie Rodrigue. In the early 1980s, Rodrigue took a series of family photographs while attending a fair. In some of those photographs, Marie Rodrigue posed similarly to the figure in this painting, who sits in a lawn chair with balloons. By taking the figure out of the context of the fair and placing her under an oak tree in a landscape setting, Rodrigue embraces the style of painting he referred to as Bayou Surrealism. The work’s title is also inspired by Rodrigue’s mother Marie who his sons called Grandmère.