Maternal Caress

A child’s bare back faces the viewer while an arm reaches around the adult’s neck. The two faces touch near the top of the group. Below them, a pale patterned dress spreads almost to the bottom of the image, surrounded by a strong orange setting. Cassatt brings the embrace close, but gives equal attention to the lines, patterns and flat areas that organise it.

Maternal Caress is a colour print of 1890–91. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s impression, 16.2.5, combines drypoint, aquatint and soft-ground etching from three plates. The familiar title came later: according to the Met, Cassatt first exhibited the design as Enfant nue, or Nude Child, and the present title derives from the 1948 catalogue raisonné. ^[1]

A surviving preparatory drawing makes this image particularly rewarding to study. It allows us to compare the arrangement before printing with the reversed final design. The transformation involves much more than adding orange to a drawing: the surrounding interior, the dress pattern and the balance between line and colour all change how the embrace is encountered.

The child’s back is the central shape

The child sits upright against the adult, with the face turned inward and the back exposed to us. The rounded back forms a substantial pale area near the centre-left. It is lightly described, especially beside the dense pattern of the surrounding dress. A few contours establish shoulder, waist and bent leg without filling the body with heavy modelling.

That difference in surface treatment makes the child easy to distinguish. Against a patterned garment, the relatively plain back becomes a resting place for the eye. Its curved outline also opposes the straighter divisions of the furniture behind. The body is soft and rounded within an interior made from more angular shapes.

We see less of the child’s face than of the adult’s. The head turns towards the cheek, drawing attention away from a frontal likeness and towards contact. This places the viewer outside the embrace, looking at a back and at the side of a head. The image offers proximity without requiring either figure to acknowledge us.

The feet provide another point of orientation. Beneath the rounded torso, a bent leg and a small descending foot interrupt the pattern on the adult’s lap. They make the child’s seated position legible. Without those details, the pale body might appear simply attached to the upper part of the dress; with them, its weight and turn can be followed.

An embrace made from overlapping contours

The arm around the neck creates a nearly continuous connection between the child’s shoulder and the adult’s head. Its horizontal reach contrasts with the more upright back below. The adult bends inward to meet it, so the upper part of the group narrows around the two faces before opening into the larger dress.

Supporting hands and arms give the embrace its second structure. One action reaches upward; the other holds the child from below. The arrangement therefore contains two different kinds of touch. The child encloses the adult’s neck, while the adult accommodates the child’s body. Neither action needs an expansive gesture to be understood.

Look at the points where contours meet. A line that clearly describes a bare arm can approach a patterned sleeve; an edge of the torso can disappear against a hand and resume below it. Cassatt relies on overlaps to clarify which part lies in front. The economy is striking because the group remains intelligible even where extensive shading is absent.

The adult’s lowered eyes and inclined head reinforce the inward direction. Dark hair supplies the strongest accent near the faces, marking the top of the figure against the light area behind. From that accent, the eye can follow the child’s reaching arm and then move down the bare back. The physical connection becomes a way of navigating the printed image.

Patterned clothing and an orange interior

The adult’s pale dress carries small repeated motifs across a broad area. These marks continue over the torso and lap, but larger fold lines also turn through them. The garment can be read as a flat patterned surface and as cloth draped over a seated body. Neither reading completely cancels the other.

The chair introduces a second patterned area. Its stronger orange motifs sit beside the paler dress, creating a contrast between neighbouring decorative surfaces. Where the adult’s elbow approaches the chair arm, bodily shape and furniture become tightly interlocked. The patterned surround presses close to the figures instead of opening into a deep room.

Orange areas extend across the lower setting and rise in angular divisions behind the pair. Above them, a broad pale shape breaks across the background. The alternation between these large areas is more immediately apparent than a continuous recession towards a distant wall. We understand enough of the interior to place the seated group, while the design continually returns attention to the surface.

The dress reaches down in a rounded silhouette, set against the warm ground. Its lower edge provides a wide base beneath the compact heads. This makes the composition stable without making it static: the small patterns keep the eye moving, and the embrace draws it back upward. A simple outline can hold considerable internal activity.

The preparatory drawing

The Met’s drawing, 64.123.3, is dated about 1891 and made in compressed charcoal and graphite over charcoal lines. The museum identifies it as preparation for the colour print. It also reports changes to the adult’s head and arms and the child’s right foot, and traces of soft-ground on the back of the sheet from transferring the design. The observations about that reverse side are the museum’s, rather than features visible in the front view reproduced with its record. ^[2]

On the drawing’s front, the adult is at the left and the child at the right. The familiar reaching arm and upright back are already present. The figures are surrounded by searching outlines rather than the final print’s orange fields and repeated dress pattern. The sheet gives a particularly clear view of how much of the composition depends on the relationship between the bodies before colour enters.

Several surrounding lines extend beyond a single firm contour. They suggest alternative positions or restatements, but the small reproduction does not allow every mark to be assigned a precise sequence. It is more useful to recognise the drawing as a place where the arrangement was worked through than to invent a complete reconstruction of each adjustment.

The head remains a concentrated area in both versions. In the drawing, dark marks in the hair set off the face; in the print, the same general contrast survives within a much more elaborate colour structure. That continuity helps connect the objects, while the changed setting shows that a preparatory drawing does not contain every visual decision of the completed design.

Transfer and reversal

Place the drawing beside the print and the change of direction becomes clear. The adult moves from the drawing’s left to the printed image’s right. The child moves the other way. The reaching arm still links the same bodies, but it carries the eye across the page in the opposite direction.

The National Gallery of Art explains the soft-ground method in its account of Cassatt’s printmaking. Tracing a drawing laid over a prepared copperplate removes the waxy ground along the pressed lines. Acid can then bite the exposed metal. The resulting plate carries a printable version of the design. Ink transferred from a plate to paper produces a reversed image. The Met’s account of the drawing’s back supplies the particular link to this composition. ^{[16] [2]}

Reversal is easy to describe as a technical consequence, yet it also changes a viewer’s movement through the group. The dark head now anchors the upper right, while the child’s back occupies the left of centre. The broad skirt still forms a base, but the direction of the embrace has been reorganised on the page.

This is why the drawing should not be treated as merely a less finished version of the same image. It is a separate object with its own orientation and working marks. Comparing it with the print lets us distinguish the design of the figures from the further decisions involved in making an image through a plate.

Three plates and different kinds of mark

The Met describes Cassatt establishing the figures in drypoint and adding tone and pattern through two further aquatint plates. It also credits Cassatt and Monsieur LeRoy as joint printers. Line, coloured area and the labour of printing thus belong to the work’s making, rather than colour being an incidental addition to a completed outline. ^[1]

Drypoint draws directly into the metal. Aquatint permits areas of tone, so it can serve a different role from an isolated incised contour. The National Gallery’s explanation of the colour series describes plates being inked and printed in sequence and alignment. That alignment allows marks carried by separate plates to work together as one image. ^[16]

The visible design benefits from this division of effects. A slender line can describe the child’s back, while a broad orange area gives the surrounding interior its strength. Small motifs can animate the dress without needing the same visual weight as the room’s largest colour field. The image depends on their relationship rather than on one kind of mark performing every task.

This does not allow us to assign every visible colour to a separate plate by eye. Three plates need not mean three simple, isolated colours. The object record supplies the plate count; the impression supplies the combined visual result. Keeping those kinds of evidence together helps explain the process without claiming to have dismantled it into a complete colour map.

A design and a particular impression

The Met identifies its impression as the sixth and final state in the Mathews and Shapiro system. Its plate measures 36.5 × 26.8 centimetres; the sheet measures 43.8 × 30.3 centimetres. Paul J. Sachs gave this impression to the museum in 1916. These particulars belong to 16.2.5. A reproduction of the shared design does not, by itself, identify the physical sheet photographed. ^[1]

A state records a stage in changes to the printing matrix. An impression is an individual printing on paper. The distinction matters because several sheets can carry the same final design, while differing in paper, inking or later collection history. A cropped image may show the figures clearly yet omit the margins that help describe the complete object.

For a reader, the practical consequence is straightforward: use the image to look at the composition, and the named museum record to understand the particular impression. Plate and sheet measurements answer different questions. The first describes the printing plate’s dimensions; the second includes the paper beyond it. Neither measurement should be silently transferred to an unidentified reproduction.

What the later title changes

The early title directs attention to the unclothed child. The later Maternal Caress directs it towards a relationship and an affectionate action. Both aspects are visible, but the emphasis differs. Knowing the title history allows us to notice how a familiar name can shape our first encounter with the image. ^[1]

If we begin with the child, the rounded back and plain skin against patterned fabric become central. If we begin with the caress, we may first follow the arm around the neck and the meeting faces. The composition supports both routes. Its richness lies partly in the fact that bodily form and physical connection cannot be completely separated.

The drawing’s museum entry also proposes that a resemblance to sitters in an oil sketch may point to a friend rather than a professional model. That is a suggestion, not a secure identification of the figures here. No name is needed to recognise the precise arrangement of contact, support and inward attention. ^[2]

Mother’s Kiss and a more open field

Mother’s Kiss belongs to the same 1890–91 colour-print series. The National Museum of Women in the Arts discusses its restrained line, pattern and compressed space. A separate impression at the National Gallery of Art, 1963.10.254, preserves the complete sheet, including a broad open area above the figures. ^{[17] [18]}

In that design, the child’s bent knees and the adult’s forward bend make a low, compact embrace. The bodies occupy the lower part of the image, so the open field becomes an active counterpart to their closeness. Looking only at a tightly cropped detail would conceal that balance.

Maternal Caress distributes attention differently. The child’s back is more upright, the arm reaches across the adult’s neck, and orange furniture and wall areas enclose the group. The dress extends down almost the whole image. The contrast demonstrates how Cassatt could make different spatial structures from a related subject, even within a single series.

The later oil painting The Caress

The Caress at the Smithsonian American Art Museum is an oil on canvas dated 1902. It is a different composition with three figures. Its date, medium and collection history belong to that painting, rather than to this earlier print. ^[19]

In the oil, an additional child approaches the central child’s cheek from the left. The central body tilts across the adult’s green clothing, creating a more diagonal, outwardly exposed arrangement. The adult and the approaching child make two points of contact around it. Brushwork supplies shifting transitions across skin and fabric.

The print concentrates the action into a two-person circuit: the upward-reaching arm, the touching faces and the support below. Its large flat areas and repeated motifs organise that circuit with a different economy. Set beside the later painting, it reveals a distinct solution to the problem of showing an embrace, rather than an early draft of a single lifelong composition.