The Bath by Mary Cassatt

The Bath
by Mary Cassatt

Oil on canvas, 1891
100 x 66 cm

The Bath by Mary Cassatt received a good deal of attention at the various museum shows at which it was exhibited during the artist’s lifetime, firstly in Paris in 1893, where it was found evidence of Cassatt’s ‘lively sentiment, exquisite taste, and great talent’.

Unusually for this stage in her career, she uses a slightly older child, but she retains the extreme refinement of feeling that characterizes her portraits of babies. Matched to this delicacy she deploys several of her characteristic compositional tactics to great effect, most strikingly the high viewpoint which, as in The Sisters, makes the figure group cohere as a single form, emphasizing the closeness of the two dark heads. The greater monumentality with which the figures are endowed through strategies such as this contributes to the dignified mood.

The influence of the Japanese print is still strong in the play with decorative patterns, in particular in the bottom half of the picture, where striped dress and carpet clash, and in the balancing of vertical and horizontal elements. Intimate feeling and decorative interest are held in a satisfying tension within the composition: the jug echoes both the effect of the child’s white skin against the dark background and the curve of her left arm, while strong vertical movements of the mother’s arm and the child’s legs, and their joint gaze into the washbowl, are reinforced by the wide stripes of the dress.

Again, the mutual absorption of the couple finds expression in the closeness of their hands and the parallel movement of limbs as the mother guides her uncertain child into the water. Caught up in their shared activity, the figures’ faces are withdrawn from us, creating a moment of privacy which the spectator cannot violate.

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The Bath
By Mary Cassatt

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