Mary Cassatt 1845-1926

Mary T. Cockroft, New York
Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York
Private Collection, Washington, D.C., 1959
By descent to the present owner

Baltimore, Maryland, Baltimore Museum of Art, Mary Cassatt, November 1941-January 1942, no. 58 (as Mother and Nude Child)

Art News Annual, 1948, p. 98
Art in America, Summer 1958, p. 100

Throughout her career, Mary Cassatt painted the daily activities of fashionable, modern women, but it was not until the 1880s that she began to depict mothers and children, the subject for which the artist became best-known.  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 affected 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.   The Mauve Dressing Gown depicts the gentle warmth and familial tenderness characteristic of Cassatt’s most successful mother and child works.

Cassatt’s interest in portraying children was fostered during her 1898 visit to America, where she accepted a number of commissions by prominent collectors in Boston and New York.  When she returned to France later that year, Cassatt continued to pursue these images of mothers and children.  As John Bullard remarks about Cassatt’s work from 1900, “By this time most of Cassatt’s pictures are marked by great simplicity and directness.  Details of costume and background are suppressed, focusing the viewer’s attention on the faces of her sitters.  The background is generally plain and flat, and the figures are compactly grouped and silhouetted against it.  The color scheme is also simplified: usually there are two dominant colors, with a contrasting third one as an accent” (Mary Cassatt: Oils and Pastels, exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C., 1972, p.64).

In the present work, Cassatt uses a variety of pinks and lavender to define the mother’s gown, which she accents with cooler shades of blue and white.   Vigorous strokes of pigment are visible in the mauve dress, the white bouquet of flowers, and the rich brown of the mirror and dressing table.  Cassatt uses these elements in a related painting, Mother and Child, circa 1908 (figure 1), which depicts a nearly identical maternal grouping, seated in front of what appears to be the same table and mirror, a vase of flowers placed on the stand behind them.  As is typical of Cassatt’s depictions of mothers and children, each figure in The Mauve Dressing Gown is individually engaged, yet their poses and gestures link them together into an intimate, cohesive family grouping.

After 1900, Cassatt’s images of children became increasingly prominent in her work:  In The Mauve Dressing Gown, the blonde child is the focus of both the mother and the viewer.  In 1902, the writer Camille Mauclair named Cassatt the “Painter of Childhood,” noting: “To paint an adult is to record a state of mind; to paint a child is to record the foreshadowing of a soul. . . . Cassatt may be the only painter today to have given us an interpretation of childhood that is contained within the child itself.  Faced with a being in process, she has not been anxious to divine its maturity.  She stops her calm, sure contemplation at the very minute in which the creature she is studying appears before her…. .and that is all she needs to create a psychology that is new, fascinating and powerfully inspired by nature” (Griselda Pollock, Mary Cassatt, Painter of Modern Women, New York, 1998, pp. 185-6).