Seated Woman with a Child in Her Arms - Bilbao Fine Arts Museum

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Seated Woman with a Child in Her Arms

Cassatt, Mary

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 22/05/1844-Le Mesnil-Théribus, Oise, France, 16/04/1926

Oil on canvas

81 x 65,5 cm

Mary Cassatt (bottom left hand corner)

c. 1890

19th century. Last decade

82/25

Contributed by the Provincial Council of Bizkaia in 1920

There is some degree of unanimity in considering Mother about to Wash Her Sleepy Child (1880, Los Angeles County Museum of Art) the first work in which Cassatt grappled with depicting women (sometimes mothers, but also nannies and caregivers) with children.

In the 1870s, the painter's work had primarily focused on describing the everyday life of contemporary women with a similar social and cultural stature as her own. She had portrayed them attending the theatre and opera or visiting museums and exhibitions. However, in the next decade her interest shifted from the public to the more private feminine spheres, and scenes of women with children became a favourite subject. Just like other female painters from the late 19th century, Cassatt was used to drawing her subjects from her closest personal and family milieu, given that the rigid social mores of the era hindered female artists' access to working with professional models or painting outside their studios. In this sense, the fact that her brother Alexander travelled in 1880 with his wife and four children from the United States to spend the summer with the painter and her parents is often cited as an explanation for her newly-kindled interest in these scenes. The presence of her nieces and nephews most likely stimulated her to develop new subjects, but we should also recall that Cassatt's depictions of women with children revive a traditional iconography in the history of Western art, namely the virgin with child. Many of her works from the 1890s were inspired by paintings and sculptures from the early Italian Renaissance, which she had the opportunity to familiarise herself with in her travels around Italy, and more importantly in her visits to the Louvre. In any event, this is a subject to which Cassatt, at her peak as an artist, devoted almost one-third of total output in oils, pastels and engravings, and it is also the subject that made her extremely popular due to her ability to depict mother-child relationships without sentimentality-albeit while introducing many gestures and details embodying tenderness.

In Seated Woman with a Child in Her Arms, which is more sketch-like and has a narrow colour range, a very young child in the arms of his mother or caregiver stares at the spectator while the woman, whose back is turned towards us, seems to be concentrated on getting ready to wash the child. The figures are monumental, perhaps to emphasise their physical contact, and they are situated in a space about which we are given little information, except for the pitcher and ewer located on the left. However, the armchair, whose seat back is in the foreground of the composition, suggests that it is a pleasant, bourgeois interior. Except for the fact that the woman's back is turned towards us, these same elements appear in other scenes of women with children painted by Cassatt around the same time, such as the oil painting Mother and Child (c. 1890, Wichita Art Museum) and the pastel Woman and Child before a Shelf with a Pitcher and Ewer (1889, Musée d'Orsay, Paris), which also share other formal features with the work in this museum, including a lack of interest in describing the backgrounds or the fact that only half the bodies of the figures are visible. But more than as examples of "real" depictions of motherhood, these images tend to be interpreted as Cassatt's attempt to create symbolic representations of it. The fragmented vision of the figures and space and the use of an asymmetrical and somewhat unconventional composition should be related to her early discovery and assimilation of the oeuvre of Degas and Japanese engravings. The sketch-like appearance of the canvas, painted with a quick, dry brushstroke, could lead one to believe that the work is unfinished. However, we must also recall that the painting was signed by the artist, which proves that Cassatt viewed it as a finished work. Furthermore, this sketch-like quality can also be found in other works from this same period.

Seated Woman with a Child in Her Arms belongs to an important set of pieces acquired by the Provincial Council of Bizkaia for the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum in the 1st International Painting and Sculpture Exhibition held in Bilbao in August 1919. The painting had been part of the shipment made by the gallery owned by Paul Durand-Ruel (1831-1922), the first gallery owner to begin to buy works from the Impressionists. His Parisian gallery had hosted the second exhibition of these painters in 1876, and he was a pioneer in organising monographic shows on the artists with whom he worked. He became Cassatt's dealer in 1881, and although their relationship was cordial, it was often fraught since Durand-Ruel was highly selective in supporting the careers of artists: those of Degas, Monet and Renoir took root thanks to him, unlike those of Cassatt, Morisot, Pissarro and Sisley. His gallery contributed some of the most expensive paintings to the International Exhibition, in addition to Cassatt: Claude Monet's Stormy Sea, Sisley's Path in the Gardens of By, Pissarro's View of Bazincourt and Renoir's Head of a Girl. According to the documentation stored in the Durand-Ruel & Cie. archives, Seated Woman with a Child in Her Arms remained in Cassatt's possession until the 15th of June 1914, when it was purchased by the gallery. [Miriam Alzuri]

Selected bibliography

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