9 Criss

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.

The gallery in which her canvases hang contains a mother reading, surrounded by tykes,

and another mother kissing her baby on the cheeks—they are irreproachable, softly

lustrous pearls; they are family life painted with distinction, with love . . . Only a woman

can pose a child, dress it, put in pins without sticking herself.26

Cassatt succeeded in imbuing her work with a sense of humanity and charm, eschewing

the formal stiffness of traditional academic portraits. Among the impressionists, Cassatt became

the most adept at rendering scenes of children and their mothers. Unlike male contemporaries

such as Gustave Caillebotte (See Fig. 4), Cassatt mastered the ability to depict her young

subjects with natural posing and lively vigor (See Fig. 5). The themes of intimate portraits in the

domestic sphere became Cassatt’s specialty, which drew her further to ukiyo-e artists’ portrayals of everyday scenes.27

Figure 4. Caillebotte, Gustave. Child on a sofa, 1885. Oil on Canvas. Meisterdrucke. Figure 5. Cassatt, Mary. Elsie sitting on a blue chair, 1880. Pastel on paper.

26 Debra N. Mancoff, Mary Cassatt: Reflections of Women's Lives (New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1998), 83.

27 Ives, The Great Wave, 49.