Woman Sitting with Child in Her Arms Mary Cassatt Postcard

Woman Sitting with a Child in Her Arms by Mary Cassatt, oil on canvas c. 1890, is a painting of a woman seated in a white armchair with her back to the viewer holding a small toddler in her lap in a domestic interior with vase and washbasin in the background. The blue eyed child leans his head sleepily on his mother's shoulder as he gazes at the viewer. Cassatt paints the scene in contrasting warm and cool light tones of white, pink, blue, grey and black, in a painterly and sketchy manner with elegant, rigorously drawn outlines defining the contours of figures and objects. The painting is one of many treatments of Cassatt's favourite theme of mother and child, handled with classical grace and elegance as well as unsentimental realism in a warm scene of domestic tranquillity. Mary Stevenson Cassatt (1844 - 1926) was an American painter and printmaker who became an important member of the French Impressionist movement of art. Born in Pennsylvania, Cassatt studied abroad in Europe as a young woman, where she began her first studies in art. Dedicating herself to art, she enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, until she moved to Paris in 1866 to study with Jean-Leon Gerome of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and became a copyist in the Louvre. By 1874 Cassatt had a studio in Paris but struggled to exhibit in the official French Salon, until Edgar Degas invited her to join the Impressionist exhibitions. Degas tremendously influenced Cassatt, about whom he wittily remarked "No woman has the right to draw like that", and the two artists had a close working relationship for years as Mary absorbed Degas' drawing, composition, and mastery of the mediums of pastel and etching. Cassatt posed for a number of paintings by the elder artist, and created her own unsentimental, rigorously drawn figure paintings of scenes from modern life, notably many paintings on the theme of mother and child. Her series of highly original coloured prints in etching and aquatint are an unsurpassed landmark in the history of art, influenced by the elegance of classical Japanese printmakers. An early feminist and supporter of women's suffrage, Cassatt painted prolifically until well into old age, exhibiting at the notorious American Armoury Show of 1913.