Maternal Kiss

The adult turns away from us to kiss the child’s cheek. The child looks outward, with a small hand resting over the adult’s shoulder. This difference in direction gives the image its particular character: the embrace closes around the two bodies, yet one face remains open to the viewer. A large ochre-yellow sleeve supports the group from below.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art calls the work Mother and Child (Maternal Kiss) and dates it to 1896. It is a pastel on wove paper, with a sheet measuring 55.9 × 45.7 centimetres, and entered the collection through the bequest of Anne Hinchman in 1952. Its accession number is 1952-82-11. ^[1]

The picture is especially revealing about the ways an embrace can organise a portrait. Cassatt shows much of the adult’s back and hair, but comparatively little of her face. The child’s face is almost frontal. Their unequal visibility makes physical contact and outward attention coexist within a tightly enclosed group.

A child looking beyond the embrace

The child’s eyes face out from the left of centre. The mouth is slightly parted, and a small pale accent separates the lips. Neither feature requires us to settle on a single emotional description. What matters to the arrangement is that the gaze reaches beyond the adult whose cheek presses close.

The face is framed by reddish-brown hair that rises at the crown and curls down the side. A pale ribbon or bow appears near the top. The hair’s irregular outline contrasts with the broader, smoother mass of the adult’s hair beside it. That difference helps the two heads remain separate even where their faces meet.

The child’s forehead, cheeks and chin are softly modelled. Around them, the pale garment carries finer, more broken marks. This change in handling makes the face a relatively calm, continuous area within an active surround. The eyes can therefore hold attention without being the darkest or largest shapes in the picture.

There is also an asymmetry in access. We can look towards the child’s face, but the adult’s head partly blocks its right edge. The embrace determines how much of the child we see. Rather than presenting a detached likeness, Cassatt lets the portrait emerge from an overlap between two people.

The adult seen from behind

The adult’s head fills much of the upper right. Her hair is drawn back from the forehead and gathered low at the back. Long curved strokes follow its direction, carrying the eye from the crown towards the knot. Darker passages below the hair distinguish the neck and the turn of the head.

Only a narrow portion of the adult’s face is visible. The ear, cheek and edge of the profile provide enough information to understand the movement towards the child. The picture asks us to read a body turning rather than a face posing for inspection. The head’s large scale gives that turn considerable weight.

Her back extends down the right side in a broad light garment. Lines move from shoulder towards waist, changing direction as they cross the cloth. The surface is less uniformly finished than the child’s cheek, and the marks remain visible. This keeps the back from becoming a single flat, undifferentiated area.

The contrast between the adult’s turned head and the child’s outward face also determines the viewer’s position. We stand outside their contact. We can see the kiss as an action and meet the child’s gaze, but the adult’s attention is directed elsewhere. That divided orientation makes the scene more complex than a pair looking together towards an audience.

The small hand and the large sleeve

The child’s arm crosses the adult’s shoulder, ending in a hand near the base of the neck. The fingers spread lightly across the pale collar area. This is the clearest small gesture in the picture. It joins the child to the adult across a boundary that would otherwise be described mainly by hair and fabric.

Below it, the adult’s large sleeve curves up towards the shoulder. Its folds form a broad diagonal from the lower left into the centre. The child rests above this enclosing shape, so the sleeve makes support visible even where the adult’s hand is not prominently displayed.

The two gestures operate on different scales. A small hand gives a local point of contact; the sleeve gives the whole group a substantial base. Following one after the other, the viewer can trace an enclosure from the child’s shoulder across the adult’s back and down into the lower arm.

The large sleeve also controls the proportions of the image. It occupies a striking amount of space, almost competing with the paired heads. Its warm colour draws attention down from the faces, making the act of holding as important to the composition as the kiss itself. The adult is present as a supporting body, not only as a profile at the child’s cheek.

Pale pattern against warm fabric

The child’s light garment is scattered with small blue-violet marks. At the neckline, these gather into a denser patterned area; farther down, folds and scattered strokes interrupt the pale surface. The marks remain fine enough to distinguish the garment from both the child’s skin and the adult’s larger sleeve.

In the sleeve, longer strokes follow the folds. Ochre and yellow passages sit beside muted pink, brown and cooler accents. The resulting shape has volume, but that volume is assembled from visible marks. Several folds converge near the shoulder before opening into the broad lower arm.

These different scales of mark establish a useful rhythm. The eye encounters a small pattern at the child’s neck, a compact hand, then a much wider fabric surface. Cassatt does not describe every part of the group at equal density. The changes help articulate the figures while keeping the embrace readable as one large arrangement.

Colour also distinguishes the bodies without isolating them. The child’s pale clothing continues into areas of light at the adult’s collar and back, while the warm sleeve turns beneath it. Light passages connect across the group; warm and dark accents provide boundaries. This is a composition of linked surfaces as much as of two separate silhouettes.

A background made from directional strokes

The setting gives little information about a specific room. Blue-green strokes occupy the field around the heads and figures. At the left, many slant across the surface; at the lower right, darker and warmer marks gather near the edge of the garment. These passages create activity without competing with a named object in the foreground.

The direction of the background marks differs from the curves of the hair. Behind the child, the slanting field sets off the more rounded head. Around the adult’s crown, it makes the dark mass particularly clear. A relatively simple background can therefore do several jobs: distinguish silhouettes, maintain colour relationships and keep the surface active.

The open handling also changes the pace of looking. The child’s face may initially appear smoothly present, but the surrounding strokes remind us that the whole image has been drawn in pastel. Looking from the cheek to the outer field reveals a range of description within the same sheet. It does not establish how long the work took or whether every passage was intended to be equally dense.

The sheet and the collection credit

The museum’s current record gives 1896 and distinguishes the paper from its larger frame. The measurements given above describe the sheet. This is useful when thinking about the format: the upright arrangement belongs to the image on paper, while the frame adds a separate surrounding structure. ^[1]

The Anne Hinchman credit explains how the pastel entered the Philadelphia collection. It does not identify the sitters, describe an original commission or establish who first bought the work. Those are separate historical questions. The published title provides a mother-and-child subject, but supplies no individual names. ^[1]

This is also why similar titles need care. Mother and Child, Maternal Kiss and Maternal Caress can sound interchangeable when encountered in a list. Here, the outward-looking child, the adult’s large turned head and the enclosing ochre sleeve identify a particular pastel. Those visual features provide a stronger way to distinguish it than the word maternal alone.

Mother’s Kiss: a different design in print

Cassatt’s Mother’s Kiss is a colour print of 1890–91. The National Gallery of Art’s impression, 1963.10.254, is recorded as drypoint, soft-ground etching and aquatint on laid paper. It is a different object and design from the Philadelphia pastel. ^[15]

In the print, the adult bends down towards a child seated across her lap. The child’s knees are bent, and the bodies form a low, compact group. A broad open field extends above them. The restraint of the contours and the spacing of the patterned dress give that embrace a particularly economical structure.

The pastel moves the contact higher and brings the child’s face outward. The adult’s back fills the right side, while the warm sleeve supplies a larger foreground mass. There is less open space above the pair, and the varied pastel strokes make the surrounding field visibly active. The difference is not merely a change from print to pastel: the arrangement of the bodies and the direction of the gaze have also changed.

A Goodnight Hug: contact across a horizontal image

A Goodnight Hug offers another comparison in pastel. Sotheby’s 2018 catalogue dates it to 1880 and describes brown paper laid down on board. Its horizontal format and closely interlocking heads make a useful counterpart to the more upright Philadelphia composition. ^[16]

In the earlier work, a small arm circles the adult’s neck while a larger hand supports the child. The faces turn into the meeting, and the child’s head is seen chiefly from the side. Active marks in the patterned surround extend across the image, reinforcing its lateral spread.

In Maternal Kiss, the child’s outward face interrupts that inward circuit. The adult still turns into contact, but the child connects the embrace with the viewer. The broad sleeve and the adult’s back carry more of the compositional weight. These are distinct arrangements, with different dates and supports; the comparison does not establish that the same people sat for them.

Looking back at the Philadelphia pastel, the small hand over the shoulder becomes a useful starting point. It links the outward-facing child to the adult whose face is largely withheld. Cassatt gives us an embrace that is physically enclosed yet visually open on one side, sustained by the substantial shape of the holding arm.