Mary Cassatt 1845-1926

In the 1880s, Mary Cassatt began to depict mothers and children, rather than the fashionable young women who appeared so frequently in her earlier work.  This shift was immediately noted by contemporary critics, who singled out the images of women and children Cassatt submitted to the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881 for special praise.  One critic, Joris Karl Huysmans, observed that Cassatt had managed to avoid the cloying sentimentality that so often effected scenes of maternal tenderness and devotion.  In fact, Cassatt's ability to celebrate the motif of mother and child in a manner devoid of sentiment yet full of emotion is one of the distinctly modern aspects of her art. 

Judith A. Barter writes, "Even more compelling for Cassatt than children per se was their care and the emotional and physical involvements with adults this entailed.  Cassatt's compositions of 1880 and after--depicting children being bathed, dressed, being read to or held, nursing and napping--reflect the most advanced ideas about the importance of maternity and the raising of children.  As she concentrated increasingly on maternal images, she retained the highly formal structure of her earlier loge and domestic compositions but narrowed her focus, enlarging her figures of women and children in order to emphasize caretaking and physical contact (Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman, New York, 1998, p. 73).