Mary Cassatt's color prints

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 1998 by Elliot Bostwick Davis

Distinctive in the color prints is the sensuality of the nudes in The Coiffure (Pl. I) and Woman Bathing (Pl. II). Although nudes had appeared in several of Cassatt's earlier etchings,(14) the highly finished nudes in the suite of color prints are unique in her oeuvre. Her masterful weaving together of striped fabrics and floral patterns in the interiors enhances the bare torsos. In both compositions the model is reflected in a mirror. Utamaro frequently depicted young women engaged in their toilette while carefully scrutinizing their appearance in a mirror. Figures reflected in mirrors are a common sight in paintings by Degas and Edouard Manet (1832-1883), although in their compositions the mirror is frequently in a public place, such as the cafes shown in Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergere of 18811882 (Courtauld Institute Galleries, London) and in Degas's In a Cafe (The Absinthe Drinker) of 1875-1876 (Musee d'Orsay, Paris).(15) Cassatt's use of the mirror implies a quiet celebration of vanity as a positive attribute, whether in the privacy of the boudoir or in the dressmaker's fitting room (see Pl. XVII).

Cassatt's familiarity with Japanese attitudes toward the sensual aspects of a woman's neck and back is suggested by the prominence of the nape of the neck in The Coiffure and the sweep of the bared back in Woman Bathing. Cassatt's portrayal of nudity sent chills up the spines of her contemporaries. On seeing the ten color prints Degas declared: "This back, did you draw this? I cannot admit a woman can draw like that."(16) Woman Bathing probably spurred Degas to execute a series of lithographs between 1890 and 1892 in which the bather's back figures prominently (see Pl. III). Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec vulgarized the sense of decorum possessed by Cassatt's Woman Bathing when he conceived of a portfolio of ten color lithographs depicting the lives of women in Paris brothels. The one in Plate IV, for example, shows a woman bending over a washstand with a rectangular mirror and an arrangement of bottles similar to that shown in Cassatt's Woman Bathing. However, Toulouse-Lautrec emphasized the erotic nature of his subject by including above the washstand a sketch recalling an illustration from Utamaro's Poem of the Pillow of 1788, an erotically illustrated book that Toulouse-Lautrec owned.(17) Unlike Cassatt's elegant bather in a well-furnished room, or the ratified existence of Utamaro's geishas, Toulouse-Lautrec's nude exhibits flesh well-handled from daily life in the brothel.

Cassatt's Coiffure and Woman Bathing depict the same nude redheaded model, a favorite of the artist's, who also appears in two paintings: Young Woman Picking Fruit of 1891 (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh) and the painting shown in Plate V as well as in two other color prints, The Fitting (Pl. XVII) and The Lamp (Pl. VI). In the latter the figure is larger in relation to the background than in any of the other prints in the series. Cassatt focuses the viewer's attention on the curve of the nape - a shape echoed in the sweep of the fan, the frame of the sofa, and the curved panels of the lampshade. The woman is no longer in the boudoir but in a bourgeois interior furnished for entertaining. There, her beauty is the central ornament. The tilt of her head and gesture of her hand touching her hair suggest that she has a male visitor whose gaze she anticipates. The most enigmatic of Cassatt's images tram the suite, The Lamp, recalls Utamaro's portraits of the famous courtesans and beauties of his day.