Executed in 1880, A Goodnight Hug was one of Cassatt’s eleven entries, four oils and seven pastels, to the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881. Exhibited with the title Mère et Enfant, the present work represents a pivotal moment in Cassatt’s career. Pairing a tender study of motherhood with modern execution, dramatic cropping, and abstract patterning, A Goodnight Hug and its themes would ultimately become hallmarks of the artist’s most influential work. The blue chair suggested in the abstract background elements is likely the same chair represented in Little Girl in a Blue Armchair of 1878, linking A Goodnight Hug with one of Cassatt's most well-known and widely reproduced paintings.

In many ways, the advancements made in the present work prefigure numerous important modern artistic developments of the late nineteenth century: “The fresco-like aspect of Cassatt’s works testifies to the emerging concern with the decorative and with decorative schemes in general in the 1880s and 1890s. One wonders if Gauguin was attempting a similar effect … Large, easily distinguished shapes, a planar organization, shallow space, a generally cool palette, and an even light that abolishes most shadows combine to produce an effect of calm and repose. Indeed, Cassatt’s Mère et Enfant not only uses these devices but adds the abstraction produced by the lost profiles and scribbled lines of pastel. These pictures … form a watershed of important artistic concerns" (F. E. Wissman, “Realists among the Impressionists” in The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-1886, Geneva & San Francisco, 1986, p. 350).

By the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition of 1881, Cassatt’s career had witnessed a meteoric rise in production, quality, and critical reception. Her output increased dramatically from only three pictures in 1877 to a record twenty-nine in 1880. Her third showing with the Impressionists was perhaps her most successful with regards to both critical reception and sales. She even received several glowing comments from the critic Albert Wolff in Le Figaro. Wolff, who was largely harsh and unsympathetic to the Impressionists, singled her out with special praise: “…Mlle Cassatt is a veritable phenomenon; in more than one of her works she is on the point of becoming a considerable artist, with an extraordinary feeling for nature, penetrating powers of observation, and an ability to subordinate herself to the model which is characteristic of the greatest artists…” (ibid., p. 349). The critic Elie de Mont claimed that Cassatt and her other female colleague, Berthe Morisot, were the only interesting artists exhibiting. Gauguin, however, was drawn to Cassatt’s entries in particular: “Miss Cassatt has as much charm, but she has more power [than Morisot]” (quoted in E. John Bullard, Mary Cassatt, Oils and Pastels, Washington, D.C., 1972, p. 15).

The present work, with its boundary-pushing abstraction and compassionate study of motherhood, won praise from even the most adversarial critics. These themes, presented masterfully in A Goodnight Hug, would come to define Cassatt’s importance as a both a pioneering woman and thoroughly modern painter in the late nineteenth century.