The foot in the basin

The child will not keep still, and the painter has decided that this is fine.

Picture a studio in 1893; we have to imagine it, because nobody wrote it down. A woman in a striped wrapper, lavender and green and white, sits low with a little girl on her lap. A towel is knotted around the girl’s middle. There is a white basin on the carpet and a pitcher painted with pink flowers, and the water in the basin has gone from warm to cool while the painter stands at the easel squinting. The girl has bangs cut straight across her forehead and an opinion about the cold. Her left hand grips the woman’s knee. The woman holds one small foot under the water and keeps holding it.

Mary Cassatt does not let us down to their level. She paints from above, steeply, so the patterned carpet climbs up the canvas and the floor seems to stand on end. She had been studying Japanese woodblock prints closely, and you can see their lessons all over the picture: hard outlines, flat planes of pattern stacked against one another, the bodies cropped close by the edges. The stripes of the dress run in long diagonals down toward the basin.

Everything leads to the hands. The woman’s right hand is wet and red-knuckled at the bottom of the bowl. Her left arm circles the child’s waist, firm, a fence more than an embrace. Her face is tipped down and pink with concentration, and the girl’s head bends to the exact same angle. Both of them are watching the foot. Neither of them is watching us. They have something better to do.

The museum’s label is careful: a woman steadies “a young charge.” Mother or nurse, the picture never says. It cares about the grip, the matched tilt of two heads, the water going cold.

Cassatt was the only American invited to show with the original Impressionists, and she spent her career painting women and children without sugar. This canvas went out on exhibition the year it was finished, and in 1910 the Art Institute bought it, the first of her works to enter its collection. The water itself is a few strokes of grey and white, and through it, faintly, you can make out the small foot, held.

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