Child's Bath Mary Cassatt Postcard

The Child's Bath by Mary Cassatt, oil on canvas 1893, is a figurative painting of a mother holding her little girl in her lap, washing the feet of the child in a round, white washbasin bowl in a domestic interior. Cassatt constructs the picture from a high point of view with diagonal composition, creating a sense of dynamism in the manner of her mentor Degas, yet views the scene of calm tranquillity with elegant, rigourous drawing and form flattened somewhat in the manner of Japanese prints. The flattened patterns of rug and wallpaper play against the carefully modelled forms of the figures, with a range of tonal values from deep black to delicate pale grey and white. With painterly grace, Cassatt captures a fleeting moment in time in an unsentimentally realistic scene of timeless beauty. Mary Stevenson Cassatt (1844 - 1926) was an American painter and printmaker who became an important member of the French Impressionist movement of art. Born in Pennsylvania, Cassatt studied abroad in Europe as a young woman, where she began her first studies in art. Dedicating herself to art, she enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, until she moved to Paris in 1866 to study with Jean-Leon Gerome of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and became a copyist in the Louvre. By 1874 Cassatt had a studio in Paris but struggled to exhibit in the official French Salon, until Edgar Degas invited her to join the Impressionist exhibitions. Degas tremendously influenced Cassatt, about whom he wittily remarked "No woman has the right to draw like that", and the two artists had a close working relationship for years as Mary absorbed Degas' drawing, composition, and mastery of the mediums of pastel and etching. Cassatt posed for a number of paintings by the elder artist, and created her own unsentimental, rigorously drawn figure paintings of scenes from modern life, notably many paintings on the theme of mother and child. Her series of highly original coloured prints in etching and aquatint are an unsurpassed landmark in the history of art, influenced by the elegance of classical Japanese printmakers. An early feminist and supporter of women's suffrage, Cassatt painted prolifically until well into old age, exhibiting at the notorious American Armoury Show of 1913.