Maternal portraits such as Children Playing with a Cat were the primary subject matter Cassatt focused on throughout her career. Her paintings in oil and pastel mostly depicted domestic interiors and figural works which often explored the relationship between mother and child. Cassatt’s refinement of this specific subject was a practice also championed by Degas, who once wrote to another artist, “. . . it is essential to do the same subject over again, ten times, a hundred times. Nothing in art must seem to be chance, not even movement” (as quoted in E. John Bullard, Mary Cassatt: Oils and Pastels, New York, 1972, pp. 15-16). Cassatt affectionately remained devoted to these familial subjects and Children Playing with a Cat is among her most important variations of this theme.
“. . . it is essential to do the same subject over again, ten times, a hundred times. Nothing in art must seem to be chance, not even movement”
The present work exhibits the gentle warmth and familial tenderness characteristic of Cassatt's mother and child paintings. It is one of a series of major works in which the artist depicts a mother with more than one child. Beginning in 1905, Cassatt experimented with the three-figure composition when she created two tondo murals for a competition to decorate the new Statehouse in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, close to her childhood home in Lancaster County. One of these tondos, Mother and Two Children (Fig. 1), is the inspiration for the present work. After selling the tondo to her friend J. Howard Whittmore, who wrote to Cassatt to tell her of his admiration for the work, she replied: "It is a great pleasure and gratification to me that you like and want to own that particular picture, the 'Tonda' for I have always thought it one of my best." In Children Playing with a Cat, Cassatt now opens the composition and extends the three figures across the horizontal format. The combination of its charming intimacy, large scale, and complexity of composition place it among her most important works of the 1900s. The model for the child in Children Playing with a Cat is a young girl known as Sara, a frequent sitter for the artist. The model for the mother is Renée Chauvet, a woman from a village close to the artist's chateau at Beaufresne, fifty miles northwest of Paris. Chauvet was a favorite whom Cassatt also depicted in other paintings during the period from 1905 to 1910, including Young Mother and Two Children (1908, White House Collection/White House Historical Association, Washington, D.C.).
While Children Playing with a Cat is typical of Cassatt’s multi-figural compositions it is a uniquely extravagant rendering among the artist’s oils and pastels of this subject. The present work was influenced by Cassatt's growing interest in the details of her subjects' attire. In fact, during Cassatt's late period, from 1900-15, the artist was perhaps more interested in the depiction of costume and textiles than in the shape of the underlying figures. In the present work, as in other Cassatt pastels from this period, the elder child's dress and elaborate hat not only draw the viewer's attention immediately to her, but also reveal the artist's fascination with the extravagant fashions of the era. Cassatt's interest in depicting elegant costume can also be seen in the emphasis the artist gives to the green fabric of the mother's gown in The Caress (1902, National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, D.C.) and in what Nancy Mowll Mathews describes as the insistent linear patterns of the garments in Young Mother Sewing (1902, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
Cassatt's focus on color in Children Playing with a Cat demonstrates a new direction for the artist. Nancy Mowll Mathews concludes: "Rather than finding all the colors of the spectrum within a few square inches of flesh, we find them in discrete areas on the canvas. From the red-blue of the vase on the mantel to the blue-green of the child's dress, to the yellow of the mother's dress and its yellow-orange accents, and finally to the red of the chairback behind her, Cassatt has arranged the colors in the order in which they would appear on a color chart. It is surprising to find this kind of color experimentation in Cassatt's work at this time. It hints not only at an awareness of current Divisionist color theories being proposed by Matisse and other radical artists but also at an interest, albeit restrained, in putting them into practice. Despite her well-known disdain for Matisse's work and his followers, Cassatt, like most older artists in Paris during this tumultuous decade, could not shut out his influence entirely" (Nancy Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt, New York, 1987, p. 135).
