Artwork · 19th century · Mary Cassatt

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The Child's Bath

Mary Cassatt1893Oil on canvas101.3 × 67.3 cm

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At a glance

Text size

A woman holds a little girl on her lap and washes the child's foot in a basin of water.
Mary Cassatt, an American painter based in Paris, painted it in oil on canvas in 1893.
The view from above and the patterns filling every corner show how closely she had studied Japanese woodblock prints.

Reading the picture

5 places to look closer

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Begin with the two heads. The woman and the child are looking at the same spot: the feet in the water. Their faces almost touch, and both have rosy cheeks. We can't tell whether the woman is the mother or someone else who looks after the child, but the painting makes clear how close they are.
Zoom into the basin. The woman's hand wraps around the child's small foot. Each toe is outlined in a thin reddish line. The water is just a few strokes of bluish gray.
Now look at the hands on the child's stomach. The woman's left hand holds the girl steady. Next to it, the child presses her left hand into the striped dress over the woman's knee. A large hand and a small hand sit side by side, and you can see at once who is leaning on whom.
Move to the white pitcher at the lower right. A gold line runs around the rim and handle, and pink flowers with blue leaves decorate the body. The bottom edge of the painting cuts the pitcher off. Boldly cropping objects at the edge was a device Cassatt had seen again and again in Japanese prints.
Zoom into the rug at the lower left. Red and olive bands cross each other in a diamond pattern. Because we are looking down from above, the floor seems to stand up like a wall instead of lying flat. Painted right on top of the pattern, in dark strokes, is the signature Mary Cassatt.

When it was painted

In 1893 Mary Cassatt was forty-nine, and two big projects marked her year. The first was a huge mural, Modern Woman, for the Woman's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It was commissioned under Bertha Palmer, the Chicago philanthropist who led the fair's board of women. The second was a solo exhibition at the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris.

In that show's sales catalogue, The Child's Bath was number one. Cassatt had grown up in Pennsylvania and had been living in Paris for close to twenty years. At Edgar Degas's invitation she had shown with the Impressionists, the only American asked to join the original group. Now she had a show under her own name, and this was the picture she put first.

Cassatt never married and had no children of her own. Yet women and children together became the subject she returned to most. The Art Institute of Chicago describes these scenes as sensitive but unsentimental.

After 1893 the painting crossed the Atlantic and kept traveling. In 1895 it hung at Durand-Ruel's New York gallery under a French title, La Toilette. In 1898 it appeared at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the school where Cassatt had trained as a young woman. In 1910 the Art Institute of Chicago bought it, the first work by Cassatt to enter the museum.

The Chicago mural did not survive in the same way. After the fair closed, Modern Woman disappeared, and no one knows where it is today. Look again at the two heads bent over the basin. The wall-sized painting is gone, but this quiet moment of washing a child's feet is still here.

The painter

Mary Cassatt

1844–1926

When painting this, the artist was about 49 years old

All paintings by Mary Cassatt →

The Child's Bath

Questions to think about

Look for itWhere can you find stripes, flowers and diamond shapes in this picture?
Why?Why do you think Cassatt chose to look down on this scene from above instead of painting it at eye level?
What about you?Caring for small children has long been treated as invisible work. Do you think the people who do it today get enough respect and fair pay?

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