The Bath

In the year 1891, Cassatt painted her art piece, The Bath, which was an oil painting on canvas that portrayed two subjects, a mother and a young child. In the Painting, Cassatt depicted a mother figure holding her child carefully and defensively using her left arm, whereas her other arm cautiously washes the child's feet.

In the Painting, the child's little but fleshy left hand supports the child on the mother's thigh, whereas the other arm is supported strongly on the child's leg. Mary Cassatt was strongly motivated and influenced by her friends and other Impressionists of the time, particularly her friend Edgar Degas. Mary Cassatt started exhibiting alongside other Impressionists in the year 1875, whereby at the time, she was able to meet and become friends with Impressionists, including Berthe Morisot as well as Claude Monet. In the year 1890, Cassatt was astonished and impressed by the prints of the Japanese arts while on an exhibition at the Beaux-Arts Academy in France. This was happening three years before she painted her art piece, The Child's Bath, or as commonly known, The Bath. Cassatt was attracted by how simple and clear the Japanese art was, as well as the masterly usage of blocks of color. Therefore, her Painting, The Bath, was greatly influenced by the Japanese prints and Edgar Degas, her fellow Impressionist.

Mary Stevenson Cassatt was born in the year 1844 and died in the year 1926. She was at the time a well renowned American painter who was a local from the state of Pennsylvania, but she spent most of her adult life living in France. While living in a foreign nation, she became friends with Edgar Degas before she started exhibiting among the Impressionists of that period. As a painter, Mary Cassatt, many a time painted pictures that depicted the social as well as the private lives of women, with a particular focus on the compassionate relationships and closeness between mothers and children.

As a painting artist during the time, she benefited from a wave of feminism, which took place during the mid -the 1800s, enabling somehow greater accessibility to educational opportunities. Cassatt leveraged on that to become of the women of the time who were outspoken and who championed for equality for women, pushing for alongside her friends for equal scholarship chances for students at the time, as well as for the rights of participating in a voting exercise in the early 1900s. As a prosperous woman who was well educated, and who never committed herself to any marriage, she painted images that depicted mothers and women with nobleness and the impression of a more meticulous, purposeful inner life.