The Child’s Bath

The Child’s Bath, oil-on-canvas painting created in 1893 by American artist Mary Cassatt during her mature period. The work depicts an intimate and tender moment between a woman and a child without indulging in excessive sentimentality. Like much of Cassatt’s work in the early 1890s, The Child’s Bath combines the techniques of her fellow Impressionists with the aesthetics of Japanese printmaking.

Cassatt was an ambitious artist who neither married nor had children, but she took as her subjects almost exclusively the lives of contemporary women in their roles as caretakers of children. Her choice of subject was perhaps limited by the French social norms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that dictated the spaces she could frequent and the models she could work from. Indeed, Cassatt’s models were primarily friends or relatives and their children. Like her Impressionist colleagues, Cassatt frequently painted without embellishment scenes of everyday contemporary life, especially the quotidian tasks of a caregiver.

Although the relationship between the two figures in The Child’s Bath is unclear, the details of their postures suggest a close connection. The child, her lower half wrapped loosely in a white towel, is seated on the woman’s lap, bracing herself somewhat timorously. The woman suggests safety, holding the child securely, with one hand around the child’s waist and the other seemingly washing one of the child’s feet. The woman’s mouth appears slightly open, perhaps reassuring or guiding the child or telling a story. Both figures’ heads touch as they look down at the basin.

Cassatt was known to look to the Old Masters for inspiration, and The Child’s Bath recalls traditional Madonna-and-child paintings. Yet, in many ways, it is a modern interpretation of a religious subject. Rather than a mother with her son, here is possibly a mother with her daughter, a pairing rarely seen in art history. Moreover, the painting uses a bold composition like those of Cassatt’s friend, mentor, and fellow Impressionist Edgar Degas. The figures are unposed and asymmetrical, and their faces are foreshortened as if seen from above, the way in which an individual might observe such a moment in real life.

This high vantage point is also a characteristic of Japanese ukiyo-e prints, an exhibition of which Cassatt visited at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, in 1890. Soon after seeing the show, Cassatt embarked on a series of etchings that were significantly influenced by the styles and everyday subjects of these ukiyo-e woodblock prints. The same influences are evident in the striking composition, tilted perspective, and flattened plane of The Child’s Bath.

The Child’s Bath was first exhibited in 1893 under the name La Toilette de l’enfant as part of a solo exhibition at Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris and in 1895 at his gallery in New York. The latter exhibition was received with mixed reviews. The New York Times criticized the show’s paintings for lacking the harmonious colors and soft atmosphere of Cassatt’s previous work, whereas Scribner’s Magazine praised Cassatt for “preserving all the tenderness and avoiding all of the little and the commonplace” of the mother-and-child theme. The painting was acquired in 1910 by the Art Institute of Chicago, where it remains part of the permanent collection.