Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) was an American painter and printmaker who spent most of her adult life in France. Born Mary Stevenson Cassatt in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on 22 May 1844, she died at Le Mesnil-Théribus on 14 June 1926.

In France she became a friend of Edgar Degas and showed her work with the Impressionists. The Art Institute of Chicago describes her as the only American invited to exhibit with the original French Impressionist group, and as known for sensitive yet unsentimental scenes of women and children. Her pictures often deal with the social and private lives of women, and especially with the close bond between mothers and their children. Besides painting and printmaking, she worked as an etcher and a photographer.

Among her best-known works are The Child’s Bath, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge, The Cup of Tea and The Boating Party. Her work is held by many museums, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada and the Musée d’Orsay.

The Child’s Bath, the painting shown here, is an oil on canvas of 1893, made in France. It shows a child’s bath from an overhead angle and continues her interest in scenes of bathing and motherhood. The Art Institute calls it one of her masterworks and points to the cropped forms, bold patterns and outlines, and flattened perspective she drew from her study of Japanese woodblock prints. The subject and the high viewpoint also owe something to Degas.

The canvas measures 101.3 by 67.3 centimeters. It came to the Art Institute of Chicago through the Robert A. Waller Fund and is part of the museum’s Arts of the Americas department.