Works by Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt, an American in Paris who showed with the Impressionists, painted and etched women at home and at the theatre, and above all with small children.

In 1877, after the Salon refused both her entries, Edgar Degas asked Cassatt to show with the Impressionists instead. At their 1879 exhibition she hung her sister Lydia as the Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge: in pink, in a theatre box, with a mirror behind her repeating the back of her head and the gilded tiers of the house. Critics found her colours too bright. In Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, from the year before, a child sprawls in a turquoise chair with one arm behind her head while a small dog sleeps in the next.

Degas also introduced her to etching and pastel. In 1891 she showed a set of colour prints in drypoint and aquatint, prompted by the Japanese prints seen in Paris the year before: flat areas of pale colour, and no black. In Woman Bathing, a woman bends bare-backed over a basin, her striped wrapper slipping to her waist, and the mirror on the washstand catches only her hair. A striped gown, basin and painted jug come back in the oil The Child's Bath of 1893, seen from so high up that the patterned carpet seems to stand on end.

After 1900 she painted almost nothing but mothers and children. In Woman with a Sunflower, of about 1905, a mother and the child on her lap look into a hand mirror, and a larger mirror behind them repeats them both.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Art Institute of Chicago.