The Child's Bath
Mary Cassatt (1844 to 1926) · 1893
A woman in a striped dress holds a small child on her lap and washes the child's foot in a basin of water. Both of them look down at the foot, so that their heads touch and their gaze makes a single line into the bowl. The gesture is entirely ordinary, and Cassatt makes it monumental. The child's body is solid and heavy, the woman's hand around the little waist is firm, and the whole picture is about the trust between them. There is no sentimentality, no smiling at the viewer, just the absorbed quiet of an everyday task.
Cassatt, an American from Pittsburgh who spent her career in Paris, was the only American invited to exhibit with the Impressionists, and she took from Degas and from Japanese prints a love of unusual viewpoints. Look at how high the vantage point is: you are looking down onto the scene, so the floor tips up and the patterned carpet, the striped dress and the flowered wallpaper become flat shapes pressed together. The bold outlines and areas of pattern come straight from the Japanese woodcuts she had seen in Paris in 1890. Against all that pattern, the child's pale skin and the white towel read with great tenderness.
The painting was bought by the Art Institute in 1910, when Cassatt was still alive, and it has been one of the most loved works in the American collection ever since. Cassatt never married and had no children of her own, but her pictures of mothers and children, often modelled by neighbours and their families near her house outside Paris, became her signature. A memorable detail is the jug on the floor at the left, its rim and handle painted with a few decisive strokes, the kind of touch that shows how much she had learned from Manet.
Did You Know? Cassatt was the only American artist ever invited to exhibit with the French Impressionists, showing with them from 1879.
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