Mary Cassatt
American · 1844–1926
Cassatt made mothers and children a subject serious painters would actually take up. The pictures hold no sentiment and refuse no tenderness — a child's wet hand on a mother's cheek, a sleepy head on a shoulder, the look that passes between a woman bathing her daughter and the daughter who has stopped squirming. The register is rare. The intelligence is unmistakable.
Look at *The Child's Bath* (1893) and what the painting shows is not a scene but a held attention — the mother's left hand under the child's foot, the child's hands folded on her own thigh, both heads bent to the same small task. The pattern of the carpet rises against the stripes of the mother's dress; the water in the basin is one painted note of white. Look at *Maternal Caress* (1890) and the pastel does something else again — the mother's mouth at the child's ear, the child's arm flopped over the mother's shoulder, the trust of a body that has not yet learned to defend itself against being held. These are not greeting cards. They are studies of a relationship most nineteenth-century painters either avoided or moralized into something other than what it is.
On the consumed-observation to commissioned-devotion axis the Artist Studies arc reads through, Cassatt is interesting because her subject was largely uncommissioned — she chose it. Wealthy enough not to need to paint for sale, exhibiting with the Impressionists at Degas's invitation, she trained her sustained attention on a subject the academy and the Salon both dismissed as minor. The choice was an argument: that a mother bathing her child deserved the same quality of looking Sargent gave to a senator and Degas gave to a dancer. Read her for the colour (the pinks and the wallpaper greens), for the composition (the Japanese-print influence is visible in the late work), and for the position — that the domestic interior is a serious place because serious lives happen in it.
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Read alongside
- Edgar Degas
Her closest artistic friend and the painter who invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists. Read their pictures against each other for two opposite answers to the question of how women's bodies get looked at.
- Berthe Morisot
The other woman in the Impressionist circle and the other painter who treated domestic life as a serious subject — read alongside Cassatt to see two distinct sensibilities working the same neglected ground.
- Paula Modersohn-Becker
A generation later in Worpswede, painting mothers and the pregnant body in a register Cassatt opened the door for — the line of inheritance is visible.
Through another lens
- TendernessEmotion
Cassatt's mother-and-child pictures are among the few sustained nineteenth-century studies of tenderness as a steady working register — not a moment of feeling but the practiced kind.