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Lot Essay
This work is included in the Cassatt Committee's revision of Adelyn Doehme Breeskin's catalogue raisonné of the works of Mary Cassatt.
Baby Charles Looking Over His Mother's Shoulder (No. 2) brilliantly captures Mary Cassatt's signature motif: a mother and child in a domestic interior executed in pastel hues applied in broad, expressive strokes. Here, Cassatt offers the viewer an intimate glimpse into fin-de-siécle home life, as a mother carefully tends to her young son. In Cassatt's typical manner, the complexions of the figures are warm and delicately depicted in her characteristic vivacious palette.
Cassatt, accomplished in a range of media, was first introduced to pastel by Impressionist painter Edgar Degas in Paris in the 1870s. Cassatt had met Degas after she settled in the French capital, and by 1877 he invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists. Pastel provided Cassatt the ability to capture a brilliancy of light and tone in quick, expressive strokes, and it quickly became one of her favorite mediums with which to express her intimate subject matter. As Harriet K. Stratis writes, "perhaps pastel--often thought of as painting in the dry manner--provided Cassatt with the opportunity to explore...chromatic relationships with more immediacy than painting, which does not allow for the spontaneous execution she found so desirable...The wide range of newly available pastel colors and colored papers permitted Cassatt to bring the methods of the Old Masters up to date, while putting into practice the chromatic theories of her day." ("Innovation and Tradition in Mary Cassatt's Pastels: A Study of Her Methods and Materials," Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman, Chicago, Illinois, 1999, p. 217)
In the present work, Cassatt masterfully utilizes this new medium in her portrayal of a timeless subject. A luminous example of her technical skill and passionate interest in mothers' interactions with their children, Baby Charles Looking Over His Mother's Shoulder (No. 2) is representative of Cassatt's use of modern media in her intimate portrayal of domesticity.
Baby Charles Looking Over His Mother's Shoulder (No. 2) brilliantly captures Mary Cassatt's signature motif: a mother and child in a domestic interior executed in pastel hues applied in broad, expressive strokes. Here, Cassatt offers the viewer an intimate glimpse into fin-de-siécle home life, as a mother carefully tends to her young son. In Cassatt's typical manner, the complexions of the figures are warm and delicately depicted in her characteristic vivacious palette.
Cassatt, accomplished in a range of media, was first introduced to pastel by Impressionist painter Edgar Degas in Paris in the 1870s. Cassatt had met Degas after she settled in the French capital, and by 1877 he invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists. Pastel provided Cassatt the ability to capture a brilliancy of light and tone in quick, expressive strokes, and it quickly became one of her favorite mediums with which to express her intimate subject matter. As Harriet K. Stratis writes, "perhaps pastel--often thought of as painting in the dry manner--provided Cassatt with the opportunity to explore...chromatic relationships with more immediacy than painting, which does not allow for the spontaneous execution she found so desirable...The wide range of newly available pastel colors and colored papers permitted Cassatt to bring the methods of the Old Masters up to date, while putting into practice the chromatic theories of her day." ("Innovation and Tradition in Mary Cassatt's Pastels: A Study of Her Methods and Materials," Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman, Chicago, Illinois, 1999, p. 217)
In the present work, Cassatt masterfully utilizes this new medium in her portrayal of a timeless subject. A luminous example of her technical skill and passionate interest in mothers' interactions with their children, Baby Charles Looking Over His Mother's Shoulder (No. 2) is representative of Cassatt's use of modern media in her intimate portrayal of domesticity.