Miranda: English II, Section F

The Child’s Bath, Mary Cassatt, 1893

Question: What does this painting show or depict?

This painting literally shows a mother bathing her child. The child is a girl, and the mother seems to treat her with great care, and very gently and calmly. The mother’s dress is very modest and covers almost every part of her body, besides her face and her hands. This reflects the expectations of women at this time, and the paleness of her cheek also reflects the modesty, calmness, and almost faintness or weakness that women were expected to display. The mother seems to be laboring for the child, by washing the child’s feet, and the child seems calmly at ease and releaxed. I really like this painting, it is colorful, but it uses calm or darker shades of colors, which gives the viewer a sense of calmness and relaxation. The painting is also very realistic, and shows great detail in the figures of the mother and the child, but it really makes them the center of attention, because the walls behind them and the rug that they are seated on are very dark, and are more abstract and less detailed as the people. These aspects of the painting really make the mother and child stand out from the background of the painting. The painting is not only painted in a realistic style, but it is also not posed. The gestures of the mother cleaning the child’s feet and the child with her hand on her knee are very realistic and add a sense of this painting being very much like a candid photograph. This painting would have been very different from the common portraits of the time, such as those of John Singer Sargent, depicting various women in tightly fitted gowns, posing in very modest or proud positions ( which depended on whether or not they were married), and looking right at the painter as their portrait was being painted. This painting is more realistic, and it conveys a sense of modesty and calmness without it being posed. In this way, it is able to really reflect the values for women of the time, without having to be posed. The woman in this painting would have been seen as very respectable for her modesty and her investment in caring for her child.