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Lot Essay
This rare impression of Maternal Caress is an example of the intimate domestic subjects for which Mary Cassatt is famed as both a painter and graphic artist. It reveals some of the influences she encountered while living in Paris at the turn of the century and demonstrates her unique accomplishments as a printmaker.
Stimulated by the 19th-century etching revival, Cassatt, like Degas and Pissarro, recognized the creative potential of printmaking and sought to explore it as an adjunct to her painting. A visit to the vast exhibition of Japanese color woodblock prints held at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1890 had a significant influence on the direction of her work. In that same year she began her most famous group of color prints, of which Maternal Caress is one. Like the albums depicting Japanese women in familiar domestic rituals, Cassatt created a set of ten images of bourgeois woman engaging in simple daily activities. She worked in a mixed intaglio method, incorporating some of the same compositional elements used in the Japanese woodblocks: broad, evenly-lit and shadowless color areas applied with a number of different plates, spatial compression of the figures and their surroundings, and the rhythmic play of lines and patterns.
Cassatt herself pulled many of the trial proofs of the individual plates used for each subject. In this way she could visualize and alter the areas of aquatint as well as the drypoint lines on the plates that would later be successively printed for the final states of the published editions. For the editioning of these subjects, Cassatt enlisted the technical assistance of a professional printer, Leroy. Each of the final twenty-five impressions has a slightly different appearance due to her custom of individually inking the plates and purposely varying the colors before passing them to Leroy for registration and printing.
Stimulated by the 19th-century etching revival, Cassatt, like Degas and Pissarro, recognized the creative potential of printmaking and sought to explore it as an adjunct to her painting. A visit to the vast exhibition of Japanese color woodblock prints held at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1890 had a significant influence on the direction of her work. In that same year she began her most famous group of color prints, of which Maternal Caress is one. Like the albums depicting Japanese women in familiar domestic rituals, Cassatt created a set of ten images of bourgeois woman engaging in simple daily activities. She worked in a mixed intaglio method, incorporating some of the same compositional elements used in the Japanese woodblocks: broad, evenly-lit and shadowless color areas applied with a number of different plates, spatial compression of the figures and their surroundings, and the rhythmic play of lines and patterns.
Cassatt herself pulled many of the trial proofs of the individual plates used for each subject. In this way she could visualize and alter the areas of aquatint as well as the drypoint lines on the plates that would later be successively printed for the final states of the published editions. For the editioning of these subjects, Cassatt enlisted the technical assistance of a professional printer, Leroy. Each of the final twenty-five impressions has a slightly different appearance due to her custom of individually inking the plates and purposely varying the colors before passing them to Leroy for registration and printing.