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Mary Cassatt had always exhibited
an interest in painting mothers and their children but, in 1880
Cassatt's brother, Alexander, arrived in Paris with his young
family. The arrival renewed Cassatt's interest in depicting children,
and her nephews and nieces now provided the opportunity for Cassatt
to study and paint children from life. Taking advantage of her
brother's family as models, she produced such works as the double
portrait, Portrait of Mr. Alexander J. Cassatt and his son, Robert
Kelso (1884).
One of Cassatt's earliest works on the theme of the mother and
child, Mother About to Wash her Sleepy Child (1880), is
one in which Cassatt brought together her experiments in Impressionistic
brushwork and color, particularly in the use of the complementaries
of red and green, and in the way the green of the chair affects
the local color of the white dress. But it was in 1889 that Cassatt
began the most intensive series of works on this theme, beginning
with the unfinished canvas, Emmie and her Child (1889).
While mother and child do not look at each other, they are linked
by the physical bond created by the child's hand on its mother's
face while she, in turn, clasps her child's leg. The child's
gesture is repeated in the pastel Baby's First Caress
(1891). Because of the appearance here, and in the later painting
Mother and Child (The Oval Mirror) (1901), of a nude boy-child,
and especially because this painting uses the device of the mirror
frame to act as a sort of halo, these works have been seen as
contemporary forms of the Madonna and child. Yet any lasting
association of Cassatt with this tradition is countered by the
fact that the majority of her works on the mother-and-child theme
are representations of mothers and their daughters.
It has also been suggested that
rather than these works being modern reworkings of the Madonna-and-child
motif, Cassatt instead used the parent and child to express one
of the phases of family life which starts with babyhood. This
can be seen in After the Bath (1901), Ellen Mary Cassatt
in a White Coat (1896), and The Bath (1891); moving
on through the early years of life in The Sisters (1885);
to adolescence, in Girl Arranging Her Hair (1886), and
Summertime (1894); through to the mature young woman in
Susan on a Balcony Holding a Dog (1880), or Portrait
of a young Woman in Black (1883); and finally depicting the
later stages of female life in the portraits of Cassatt's own
mother. |
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