Mother and Child

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Artist: Mary Cassatt (American, 1844–1926)
Medium: Drypoint and aquatint printed in color, with monotype inking and touches of brushed on color
Size: 11 13/16 × 9 1/2 in. (30 × 24.13 cm) (image); 11 3/4 × 9 9/16 in. (29.85 × 24.29 cm) (plate); 17 1/8 × 12 1/16 in. (43.5 × 30.64 cm) (sheet)
Museum: Minneapolis Institute of Art
Rights: Public Domain Mark

The American expatriate Mary Cassatt played a central role in Paris’s progressive art scene, beginning with her appearance in the Impressionist exhibition of 1879. Though she initially scorned printmaking, Cassatt grew to love its rigor and endless possibilities. In color printmaking, she developed a fusion between the abstract graphics of Japanese color prints and the atmospherics of Western art. Looking at Peasant Mother and Child, we hardly notice the complex process that required multi-stage development of three separate copper plates; instead, we marvel at the rich, freely-applied color of this tender scene.

Text: Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), CC BY 4.0.