The genre painting depicts a mother bathing a young child: an everyday scene that is "special by not being special". It is signed to the lower left "Mary Cassett". The woman is sitting on oriental carpet, with the child on her knees. The child has a white cloth swathed around its abdomen, and the woman is wearing a dress with strong vertical stripes of green, pink and white. The woman holds the infant firmly and protectively around its waist with her left hand while the other hand carefully washes the child's bare limbs in a basin of water, resting on the floor beside a jug decorated with a floral pattern. The chubby left arm of the child braces against the mother's leg, while its other hand grips the child's own right thigh. The mother's right hand presses firmly but still gently on the child's right foot in the basin, mimicking the child's own pressure on her thigh. In the background are floral patterns of painted furniture and wallpaper. To indicate depth, Cassatt painted the faces to recede into space. The paint strokes are layered and rough, creating thick lines that outline the figures and stand them out from the patterned background. The hand of the artist is evident through the roughness of the strokes and can be better viewed from a distance.
Influences
Cassatt was heavily influenced by some of her fellow Impressionist peers, especially Edgar Degas. The first Impressionist painting to make it back to the United States was a pastel by Degas in 1875 that she purchased. Cassatt began to exhibit with the Impressionists in 1877, where she met other fellow Impressionists such as Claude Monet and Berthe Morisot. She was struck by the Japanese ukiyo-ewoodcut prints exhibited at the Beaux-Arts Academy in Paris in 1890, three years before painting The Child's Bath. Cassatt was drawn to the simplicity and clarity of the Japanese art, and the skillful use of blocks of color, such as the c.1801 print "Woman Washing a Baby in a Tub" or "Bathtime" by Kitagawa Utamaro. She worked on a series of prints inspired by the Japanese works in the next few years, with cropped subjects, a flattened perspective and decorative patterns. This 1893 painting can be viewed as a culmination of that work. The unusual perspective of the painting, viewing the foreshortened subjects from above, was inspired by Japanese prints and Degas. "Japanese printmakers were more interested in decorative impact than precise perspective."
Provenance
The artist sold the painting to Durand-Ruel and it was exhibited at the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris in late 1893 under the title "La Toilette de l'Enfant". It was sold to Connecticut industrialist and art collectorHarris Whittemore in 1894, but lent back to Durand-Ruel for an exhibition at their New York gallery in 1895 under the title "La Toilette". It was sold to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1910.
