The Barefooted Child, Mary Cassatt

Archive Label 2003: In the late 1880s Cassatt began to specialize in the mother-and-child theme. She found inspiration from ukiyoe prints exhibited in Paris, particularly those by Utamaro. This Japanese artist’s appeal was quite likely due to a recognition of a similar focus on vignettes depicting daily life in women’s spheres-drinking tea, bathing and hairdressing, sewing, and playing with children. An affinity for textile patterning, color, and the sensuality of domestic nudity also served to unite the Japanese master and the American impressionist. Cassatt’s major achievement in printmaking was the group of eighteen color prints she produced during the 1890s. She wrote enthusiastically to friends and family that she was “attempting an imitation of Japanese methods.” These technically superior prints, however, were not created using Japanese practices. As Cassatt was unschooled in the cooperative process of the traditional woodcut production, she devised her own etching methods using up to three copper plates per print and carefully hand-coloring each before rolling them through the press. Exhibition Label: "Inspired by Japan," Mar-2003, Cori Sherman Women artists like Cassatt, it can be argued, approached the feminine spaces of domesticity in a manner that differed from their male counterparts. For example, the intimate scenes of women at their toilette or caring for their children, as in The Barefooted Child, were familiar and easily accessible to Cassatt because of her position as a woman. The ways in which Cassatt treated these subjects can also be characterized as more empathetic towards women and their roles within the domestic sphere than male artists of her era. At the same time, the very use of space within a picture by women artists like Cassatt was influenced by the prescribed spaces of femininity in nineteenth-century culture. For example, the highly compressed space found in many of Cassatt’s works may be indicative of the restrictions placed on the middle-class woman’s movement at this time.