Frederick Edwards McWilliam (1909–1992) was a Northern Irish sculptor. He began his studies at the Belfast College of Art and continued his education at the Slade between 1928 and 1931. His early sculptures were carved from Buckinghamshire cherry wood and comprised of biomorphic forms influenced by the work of Jean Arp and Constantin Brancusi.

After serving in the Royal Air Force in India during World War II, McWilliam became a teacher of drawing and sculpture, first in Bengal (1944–1946), before lecturing in London at the Chelsea School of Art (1946–47), as well as the Slade (1947–66). He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1959 and was the subject of a retrospective at the Tate in 1989. In 1992, the F. E. McWilliam Gallery and Studio was opened in Banbridge, near Belfast, to celebrate his life’s work.

McWilliam was a close friend of Henry Moore and the present work of a mother and child echoes a subject regularly depicted by his fellow sculptor. Here we see McWilliam using an unusual dark black terracotta, which owes a clear debt to the African art that he had encountered in Paris during the 1930s.