The Bath

In her print The Bath, Mary Cassatt presents a woman in a patterned yellow dress crouching besides a blue tub; her right hand tests the water's temperature, while her left arm restrains a squirming, pudgy nude toddler. The room setting is evoked by a hint of warm color over fine aquatint tone, with a single horizontal line at center right defining where floor and wall meet. Cassatt used drypoint technique to outline each figure, to delineate strands of the woman's and the child's dark hair and eyelashes, and to articulate the folds and collar of the yellow dress, its surface further enlivened with a sprig pattern created in aquatint. A few lines and a subtle veil of pale blue evoke the rippled surface of the transparent tub water. The Bath expresses the poignancy of an intimate moment devoted to an ordinary duty of child care, while it monumentalizes the bond of mother and child.

  Long an admirer of the flattened, asymmetrical compositions and female-focused, domestic subjects of traditional Japanese ukiyo-e prints, Cassatt was inspired by those she saw at a major exhibition in Paris in 1890 to embark on an ambitious series of ten color aquatints. In the difficult task of printing them she was assisted by an otherwise unidentified Monsieur Leroy, a Paris-based professional printer acknowledged by her on this impression. The resulting works, which include, in addition to The Bath, The Lamp (TF 1999.29), In the Omnibus (TF 1999.27), Woman Bathing (TF 1996.87), Maternal Caress (TF 1994.5), and Afternoon Tea Party (TF 1994.13), are now regarded as a feat of innovation and a landmark in printmaking history. As the earliest of the series, The Bath was Cassatt's first attempt to adapt a Japanese color woodcut version of the subject into intaglio, a technique with which she was more familiar. Cassatt applied colored inks to the plates selectively so as to better modulate the softness of the hues. Influenced by the aesthetic and style of Japanese prints, she flattened pictorial space, simplified outlines, and incorporated asymmetry, patterning, and areas of flat color into this image of a modern, western mother and child. Like the Japanese print she emulated, The Bath is a work of beauty and technical finesse.