12 Edmond de Goncourt, Michael Locey, and Lenita Locey. Utamaro. (New York: Parkstone International, 2012

However, beyond his down-to-earth viewpoint, ultimately Utamaro’s ukiyo-e depictions felt so

honest due to his focus on raw, sensuous love. French art dealer Edmond de Goncourt referred to

Utamaro as “the painter of Japanese love,” stating that “one must not forget that love for the Japanese is above all erotic.”28 In October 1863, de Goncourt wrote that:

The other day I bought some albums of Japanese obscenities. They delight me, amuse

me, and charm my eyes. I look on them as being beyond obscenity, which is there, yet

seems not to be there, and which I do not see, so completely does it disappear into

fantasy. The violence of the lines, the unexpectedness of the conjunctions, the

arrangement of the accessories, the caprice in the poses and the objects, the

picturesqueness.29

Cassatt clearly did not see this aspect of ukiyo-e as fit for emulation, choosing to exclude it from

the realm of inspiration she drew from Japanese art. Instead, Cassatt focused on depicting the

non-sexual love that exists between a mother and her child, rendering it in its most pure and

honest form within her works.30

Formalist Aesthetics: Cassatt’s Meticulous Emulations of the Ukiyo-e Style

After her initial introduction to ukiyo-e, Cassatt produced a series of 10 aquatint prints for

her first solo exhibition at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1891.31 Cassatt felt so fascinated that she

28 Edmond de Goncourt, Michael Locey, and Lenita Locey. Utamaro. (New York: Parkstone International, 2012) ix.

29 Lambourne, Japonisme: Cultural Crossings, 34.

30 Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 51.

31 Kelsey Martin and Nicole Myers. "Women Artists in Europe from the Monarchy to Modernism." Dallas Museum of Art. 2018. https://collections.dma.org/essay/ogGq1G4j.

visited the large ukiyo-e exhibition at the École des Beaux-Arts at least twice—once with Edgar

Degas and once again with Berthe Morisot.32 Cassatt shared her fascination in a letter to Morisot,

one of the only other women in the impressionist group, and wrote to urge her to join her in

visiting the exhibition: “Seriously, you must not miss it. You who want to make color prints, you

couldn’t imagine anything more beautiful. I dream of doing it myself and can’t think of anything else but color on copper . . . P.S. You must see the Japanese—come as soon as you can.”33 These

visits to the École des Beaux-Arts ukiyo-e exhibition represented pivotal moments in Cassatt’s artistic journey, revealing the true depth of her artistic fascination and her commitment to

drawing inspiration from the Japanese art style. Through art dealer Siegfried Bing, Cassatt

acquired works by Utamaro from the 1890 exhibition to add to her own collection, many of

which served as direct inspiration for her later aquatints. For instance, the poses in Utamaro’s prints Bain d-enfant (no. 37) and Femme à sa toilette, examinant sa coiffure au moyen d-un

double miroir (no. 375), among those Cassatt purchased from the 1890 exhibition, also appear in

Cassatt’s 1891 10-print aquatint series.34

As Cassatt began working with fellow artist Edgar Degas to master her technique and

create her own prints, perhaps what drew her most to printmaking was the exciting challenge it

presented. Drypoint required the artist to be exacting and precise in every line, allowing far less

room for error than painting. As woodblock master Katsushika Hokusai demonstrated in his print

Egrets from Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawing (See Fig. 6), ukiyo-e artists could render entire

forms with a few carefully placed lines, creating a display of pure skill.

32 Ives, The Great Wave, 45.

33 Mathews, Mary Cassatt, 194.

34 Johnson, “Cassatt’s Color Prints,” 31.

Figure 6. Hokusai, Katsushika. Egrets from Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawing, 1823.

In her admiration of the printmaking medium, Cassatt explained: “That is what teaches one to

draw. In drypoint you are down to the bare bones; you can’t cheat.”35 Cassatt was eager to hone

her skills and launched herself into the disciplined process of creating prints, devoting more than

a year to develop a series of 10 aquatints for her first solo exhibition.

Cassatt’s first attempt at ukiyo-e emulation was The Bath (See Fig. 7). She chose the

subject matter of a mother bathing her child, a scene that also appeared many times in Utamaro’s work (See Fig. 8). At initial glance, it is clear that Cassatt imbued The Bath with many exacting

stylistic similarities drawn from the ukiyo-e artistic style. To create her composition, Cassatt

adopted Utamaro’s down-to-earth viewpoint, intertwining of material and child forms, and flatly

35 Mancoff, Mary Cassatt: Reflections of Women's Lives, 15.

Figure 7. Cassatt, Mary. The Bath. 1891. Softground etching with aquatint and drypoint on paper, 12 3/8 x 9 5/8 in. National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. Figure 8. Utamaro, Kitagawa. Bathtime (Gyōzui), ca. 1801. Woodblock print, 14 11/16 x 9 7/8 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

colored masses against the counterpoint of embroidered patterns.36 Cassatt also borrowed the

print format generally used by Utamaro: the upright ōban, measuring about fifteen inches tall by ten inches wide. Thus, her aquatints were larger than most contemporary French prints.37

Cassatt’s use of colors also bears striking similarities to the Utamaro prints that she studied from. Due to their time spent hanging in her glass veranda, it is very likely that Cassatt’s

36 Ives, The Great Wave, 49.

37 Ives, 46.

collection of reference prints was actually faded and overexposed to light. Her subtle, warm, and

pastel palette bears no apparent resemblance to that of a fresh Utamaro print of the 1790s; thus,

Cassatt’s choice to forgo the use of vivid colors reveals the depth of her precision in her copies.38

However, the faded colors in many of her prints still clearly display ukiyo-e’s tripartite color scheme.39 Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro admired Cassatt’s scope of technical achievement in aquatint color printing, writing in praise to his son Lucien that: “the tone, even,

subtle, delicate . . . the result is admirable, as beautiful as Japanese work, and it’s done with

printer's ink!”40

Figure 9. Cassatt, Mary. Gathering Fruit, 1894. Drypoint, softground etching, and aquatint, printed in color, 14 1/2 x 20 in.

38 Johnson, “Cassatt’s Color Prints,” 34. 39 Johnson, 35.

40 Lambourne, Japonisme: Cultural Crossings, 38.

Cassatt’s emulations of Japanese artwork also revealed a display of sheer technical skill. She was “unprecedented” in her application of using the positive space of white paper as a shape, just like ukiyo-e artists.41 Forgoing the use of shadows, Cassatt also modeled body contours

masterfully with line alone. The body of the child in Cassatt’s print Gathering Fruit is comprised

of only a sparing number of carefully drawn curves, creating a striking form without the use of

any classical artistic shading techniques. (See Fig. 9) "I do not admit that a woman can draw like

that," remarked Degas when he saw Cassatt's prints.42

Cassatt’s Genteel Viewpoint

In spite of her specific stylistic emulations, Cassatt ultimately created works that were far

more toned-down than ukiyo-e in terms of sensuality. In comparing Cassatt’s version of a

dressing scene in her work The Fitting (See Fig. 10) against Utamaro’s A Woman Dressing a

Girl for a Kabuki Dance (See Fig. 11), we see that Cassatt chooses to highlight the materiality,

instead of the sensual romantic aspects, of everyday leisure. She emphasizes the detailed and rich

patterns of dresses, wallpaper, and carpet.43 While Utamaro places his figures in open space,

Cassatt embeds her subjects squarely into a clear environment.44

Differences in artistic line quality also reveal Cassatt’s more reserved style. Ukiyo-e lines

experiment freely with the natural variation of thickness or fineness in bold brushstrokes, often

using only one continuous line with all its fluid imperfections to render a smooth curve.45 On the

41Johnson, “Cassatt’s Color Prints,” 36.

42 Ives, The Great Wave, 53.

43 Yoshihara, Embracing the East, 52.

44 Ives, The Great Wave, 51.

45 Goncourt, Utamaro, 15.