Mary Cassatt's color prints

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 1998 by Elliot Bostwick Davis

I recall the time when she was interested in etching. Eight o'clock in the morning would find her in her gray blouse in the small pavilion over the dam that fed her piece d'eau and where she had installed her printing press. There she would work while daylight lasted with the aid of a printer. She did her own coloring and wiping of the plates. It was at the cost of much physical strain for she actually did the manual work.[2]

Cassatt's labors yielded a refined sense of modern femininity and her most masterfully executed prints in color. Although the works are well known, both individually and as a suite, it is the interrelationship of the images that affords an insight into the mind of the artist. In the context of her subsequent work on the monumental mural Modern Woman [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED] created for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, Cassatt's ten color prints intentionally portray a distinctive view of women in the late nineteenth century.

The prints were first exhibited in April 1891 at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris, where Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), a fellow printmaker and exhibitor; saw them and wrote to his son Lucien (1863-1944):

You remember the effects you strove for strove for at Eragny? Well, Miss Cassatt has realized just such effects, and admirably: the tone even, subtle, delicate, without stains on seams: adorable blues, fresh rose, etc. Then, what must we have to succeed?... money, yes, just a little money. We had to have copper-plates, a boite a grain, this was a bit of a nuisance but it is absolutely necessary to have uniform and imperceptible grains and a good printer But the result is admirable, as beautiful as Japanese work, and it's done with printer's ink![3]

Pissarro alluded to Cassatt's financial independence, which supported her grand vision of a large portfolio of color prints involving several plates and many states to be issued in editions of only twenty-five.[4] More importantly, he admired her ability to evoke the palette and subtle execution of Japanese woodblock prints.

Cassatt would have known Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints through the impressionist artists with whom she was invited to exhibit in 1877.[5] However, her passion was stoked by the eighteenth-century master printmakers Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806). More than one hundred of his woodblock prints and illustrated books had taken Paris by storm in 1890, when they were exhibited at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. To her fellow painter Berthe Morisot (1841-1895), Cassatt raved about the Utamaro exhibition:

I think that for the time being I am not able to go and have lunch at Mezy, but if you would like, you could come and dine here with us and afterwards we could go to see the Japanese prints at the Beaux-Arts. Seriously, you must not miss that. You who want to make color prints you couldn't dream of anything more beautiful. I dream of it and don't think of anything else but color on copper. [Henri] Fantin[-Latour; 1836-1904] was there the 1st day I went and was in ecstasy. I saw [James] Tissot [1836-1902] there who also is occupied with the problem of making color prints....You must see the Japanese - come as soon as you can.[6]

Cassatt made public her debt to Japanese prints in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition of her ten prints. There she called The Bath, which is considered the first in the series, "Essai d'imitation de l'estampe japonaise."[7] The contemporary critic Georges Lecomte (1867-1958) remarked that The Bath stood apart from the rest of the suite for its "study of the process, a deliberate European translation of Outamaro."[8]

Cassatt was so taken by Utamaro that she eventually assembled a collection of his prints, examples of which survive in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.[9] Her selection reveals her interest in two of Utamaro's major themes: elegant courtesans or bourgeois women tending to their elaborate toilettes and mothers with their children.

At her Chateau de Beaufresne in Oise, Cassatt installed her ten color prints near her Japanese print collection. The American artist George Biddle (1885-1973) recalled tiptoeing out after a visit and "pausing to look at dry points and colored aquatints along the wall [then] out through the cold glass-covered veranda where hung the Utamaros and one or two Hokousais [Katsushika Hokusai; 1760-1849]."[10]

Called the founder of the "school of life" by Edmond de Goncourt (1822-1896),[11] Utamaro's vision inspired Cassatt to portray the bond between mother and child in a way that immediately distinguished her maternal scenes from those of her French and British contemporaries. By 1889 Cassatt had produced a suite of twelve drypoint prints that depict mothers and children as well as young women in a manner that recalls Utamaro's. However, the addition of color in the suite of ten prints adds a richness to the resonance of her reference to Utamaro's imagery.[12]

Utamaro frequently portrayed women with children, but in several portfolios he also represented the daily lives of women and young girls. In Twelve Hours of the Green Houses (1795), which Goncourt considered the most beautiful of all Utamaro's portfolios, he represented the daily routines of refined courtesans. His attention to the latest fashions would have appealed to Cassatt, who was well known for her sartorial elegance. In two of his most complex early prints Cassatt's colleague Edgar Degas showed her smart silhouette in compositions inspired by Japanese woodblock prints and the narrow hashira-e prints designed for the pillars of Japanese houses.(13) Utamaro, above all other members of the ukiyo-e school, represented women who embodied a cultivated femininity and sensuality - attributes that Cassatt evoked in her color prints.