Mary Cassatt, 1880 - Mother About to Wash Her Sleepy Child - fine art print

Available product materials

For every fine art print we offer different materials & sizes. We allow you to pick your favorite size and material among the following product individualization options:

• Aluminium dibond print: Aluminium Dibond prints are metal prints with a true depth effect. The UV print on aluminium is the most popular entry-level product and is an extremely stylish way to display art prints, since it draws focus on the whole artwork.
• Canvas: The canvas print is a printed cotton canvas mounted on a wood frame. Also, a canvas creates a nice and pleasing feeling. Your printed canvas of your favorite artwork will allow you to transform your new art print into a large size collection piece. Canvas prints are relatively low in weight, which implies that it is quite simple to hang the Canvas print without additional wall-mounts. That is why, canvas prints are suited for all kinds of walls.
• Print on glossy acrylic glass: An acrylic glass print, often referred to as a an art print on plexiglass, transforms an original into magnificient home decoration. Our acrylic glass protects your selected art replica against light and heat for decades.
• Printed poster (canvas material): Our poster print is a UV printed sheet of canvas paper with a granular texture on the surface. Please note, that depending on the absolute size of the poster print we add a white margin of around 2-6cm round about the artwork in order to facilitate the framing with your custom frame.

Legal note: We make every effort to describe our art products with as many details as possible and to exhibit them visually on the product detail pages. Although, some colors of the print materials and the print result might vary marginally from the representation on your monitor. Depending on your settings of your screen and the nature of the surface, not all color pigments will be printed as exactly as the digital version shown here. Given that all our are processed and printed by hand, there may as well be minor differences in the size and exact position of the motif.

Additional description as provided by the museum (© - by Los Angeles County Museum of Art - Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

This painting is considered among Cassatt’s earliest, if not her first, treatment of her popular mother and child image. According to Achille Segard, the painting was exhibited during April 1880 in the Fifth Impressionist Exhibition. Although none of Cassatt’s contributions is enumerated in the catalogue, she is known to have shown eight paintings. If Mother about to Wash Her Sleepy Child was included, then the customary explanation of Cassatt’s use of this theme, i.e., that she began painting the subject after spending much time with her nieces and nephews during her brother Alexander’s visit to France in the summer of 1880, is incorrect. Whatever her initial motivation, Cassatt would devote nearly one third of her artistic production to such themes, as did many artists of the period. Mother about to Wash Her Sleepy Child is an example of Cassatt’s work as an impressionist, shortly before her mature, more solid style began to emerge. In the 1870s, no doubt inspired by Degas and other French impressionists, Cassatt began depicting intimate domestic scenes, often of figures in interiors. In this painting a woman tenderly washes her child. The image is cropped on both sides --a favorite device of Degas, who borrowed it from contemporary photographs and Japanese prints -- and the entire scene is slightly tilted up and compressed into the narrow foreground. The stripes of the chair’s upholstery and the wallpaper intensify this verticality. While the Japanese qualities of Cassatt’s art are usually considered in terms of her later paintings and prints, she actually assimilated the oriental aesthetic quite early. Already apparent in Mother about to Wash Her Sleepy Child are the use of an intimate subject and a skillfully balanced surface design incorporating areas of patterning, both encouraged by the example of Japanese prints. Historians have often commented on the pose of the child, especially the position of his legs, finding sources in Madonna and Child images by Parmigianino (1503-1540) and Antonio Correggio (1494-1534). Although Cassatt knew of Italian religious painting and late nineteenth-century artists tended to dress biblical persons in contemporary attire, such historical sources are not necessary to explain the pose. Such awkward naturalism is quite typical of works by her mentor, Degas, and demonstrates how Cassatt utilized every aspect of the scene to convey the modernity, the untraditional representation, of the image. The overall surface is quite sketchy, as Cassatt vigorously brushed out contour lines with thick pigment to convey a sense of the momentary. Nevertheless, the form is not lost, as demonstrated by the mother’s superbly delineated right hand. In the 1870s, influenced by the impressionists, Cassatt began to lighten and brighten her palette. In her work she reflects the impressionist fascination with the color white. Although the palette used here is lighter than that of her previous paintings, it still exhibits an intense hue, as Cassatt explored the reflection of the blue and green of the setting and the flesh tones on the white attire of the figures and the interaction of all the colors. The delicate tints and brushwork are combined to create a shimmering surface. The painting was bought by Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Atmore Pope, Americans whom Cassatt met in Naugatuck, Connecticut, in 1898-99 during her first trip home since the Franco-Prussian War. Pope had amassed a fortune in the steel industry, and by the time of his introduction to Cassatt had already begun to collect impressionist paintings, which now constitute the collection of the Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, Connecticut. The Popes’ daughter, Theodate, became Cassatt’s most intimate young friend.

Art product specifications

The work of art titled Mother About to Wash Her Sleepy Child was painted by the female artist Mary Cassatt. The 140 year-old artwork measures the size: 39 1/2 × 25 7/8 in (100,33 × 65,72 cm). Oil on canvas was used by the artist as the medium of the work of art. The artpiece is in the the art collection of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which is the largest art museum in the western United States, with a collection of more than 142.000 objects that illuminate 6.000 years of artistic expression across the globe. With courtesy of - Los Angeles County Museum of Art (www.lacma.org) (public domain).Creditline of the artwork: . Besides this, the alignment of the digital reproduction is in portrait format with a ratio of 2 : 3, meaning that the length is 33% shorter than the width. Mary Cassatt was a female painter, graphic artist, printmaker of American nationality, whose style can be classified as Impressionism. The artist lived for 82 years, born in 1844 in Allegheny City, Pittsburgh, Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, United States, neighborhood and died in 1926.

Artwork information

About this product

About the artist

This text is protected by copyright © | www.artprinta.com (Artprinta)