Michelle Liu - 2022 Mitra Scholar

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Liu 9 depicted honest poses of mothers in everyday scenes such as bathing their children or playing shamisen, a three-stringed traditional Japanese instrument, as in Mother and Child (See Fig. 3).24 Just like Utamaro, Cassatt also sought to treat her subjects with more intimacy and began to use many of his prints as inspiration for her own work.

Figure 4. Utamaro, Kitagawa. Mother and Child, ca. 1801. Woodblock print, 15 x 10 3/16 in. In the works that she created during the following years; Cassatt’s clear-headed depictions of everyday maternal scenes became unique to her at the time. After viewing other artists’ contemporary portraits of children, the critic Joris-Karl Huysmans complained that “the bunch of English and French daubers have put them in such stupid and pretentious poses!" 25 However, in reviewing the impressionist exhibition of 1881, Huysmans instead found himself delighted by Cassatt’s unique portraits:

24

Ives, The Great Wave, 46.

25

Ives, 49.


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