Modern Life
Mary Cassatt
The Bath
1890–91
Drypoint, soft-ground etching and aquatint, printed in color from two plates; image 29.5 × 24.8 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
A woman in a yellow dress steadies a child on her lap beside a basin of water. It is the first of ten color prints Cassatt showed in Paris in 1891.
- The everyday subject, a quiet moment at home, is Impressionist, but the flat, unshaded color and firm outlines follow Japanese prints, a step away from Impressionism's broken brushwork.
- Cassatt printed it with a professional printer, Monsieur Leroy.
- An early printing used one plate; this sheet used two, for lines and for tone.
- Look at the plain yellow dress beside the small ripples in the basin.
- Paul J. Sachs gave it to the Met in 1916, the year its print department began.
Japanese prints of women's daily routines were widely collected in Paris in the 1880s and 1890s. Cassatt adapted them to Western home life.
- Drypoint
- Lines scratched straight into a metal plate with a sharp needle.
- Aquatint
- An etching method that prints areas of even tone.
Themes
Image: Wikimedia Commons (CC0 file from The Met's Open Access release) · CC0