Mary Stevenson Cassatt played a leading role in the depiction of women in Paris - the capital of the Arts in the late 19th century. She has studied painting in the United States, France, Italy and Spain, and has exhibited at the Paris Salon on several occasions.
Cassatt ultimately discovered the works of Utamaro and Toyokuni while admiring japanese prints and engravings at an exhibition in 1890. She was deeply Impressed by the aesthetics of the Japanese masters and drew inspiration from them in her paintings.
Around 1880, Cassatt began to focused on the figures of the mother and the child, and devoted many traditional representations to that topic. In The Child's Bath, the wrapping arms and the soft touch of the mother (or maternal figure) give the scene tenderness and elegance. In a protective gesture, the mother wraps her left hand around the child and gently washes his feet with her right hand.
In order to intensify the contrasts in the picture, Cassatt emphasizes the faces of her characters with thick irregular brushstrokes, that distinguish them from the background. She also introduces elements of Japanese aesthetics and colors from East Asian Art. Her painting displays solid colors and decorative elements such as flowers, which will often recur in her works.
Throughout her career, Cassatt produced numerous portraits of women and children and some consider that she reached her peak between 1890 and 1910. By combining the rigor and spare style of Japanese printmaking with the abundance of color of the Impressionists, Mary Cassatt was able to establish herself and was one of the few women artists in the 19th century to gain international notoriety during her lifetime.
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1. Mary Cassatt, The Child's Bath, 1893, oil on canvas, 100.3 x 66.1 cm, Art Institute of Chicago
Sullivan, Mark. “Mary Cassatt: An American Impressionist in Paris. Nancy Mowll Mathews and Pierre Curie. Eds. Yale University Press, 2018.” Journal of American culture (Malden, Mass.) 42, 4 (2019): 354.
Russel Clement, Annick Ouzé et Christiane Erbolato-Ramsey, The women impressionists : a sourcebook, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000.
https://www.artic.edu/artworks/111442/the-child-s-bath
https://www.psynem.org/Art_psychanalyse/Des_arts_des_psys/Mary_Cassatt_portraits_mere_enfant