Mary Cassatt, The Child’s Bath, 1893, Art Institute Chicago

Cassatt & Caretaking

Jacqueline Kolosov

At least twice a year my mother, my younger sister and I would take the train into Chicago, then walk the long blocks to Michigan Avenue where the Art Institute’s steps, flanked by a pair of immense stone lions, came into view. Inside, just beyond the top of another staircase, awaited the light-filled rooms of the Impressionist wing. Here I liked to sit on a bench in front of Monet’s haystack series, a quartet of paintings attuned to the changing light of the day and of the season. Or I would stand before a still life by Cézanne, longing to run my fingertips along the composition’s fruit-laden cloth. Renoir’s circus girls intrigued me, too, especially their gold-fringed costumes and the oranges they juggled in their nimble hands.
        My favorite paintings were those by Mary Cassatt who dedicated herself to exploring the lives of women and children in paintings with titles like “Little Girl Leaning on her Mother’s Knee,” “Emmie and her Child” and “Pensive Marie,” which depicts a red-haired child whose preoccupied eyes avoid the viewer’s, and her mother’s. Of all of Cassatt’s works, the one I most loved was “The Child’s Bath,” one of the Art Institute’s prize holdings. Painted in 1893, “The Bath” depicts a dark-haired mother in a striped dressing gown of mint, lilac, and silver. On her lap sits her daughter whose equally dark hair is fringed by bangs. The mother is focused on washing her child’s feet in a porcelain basin. The composition guides the viewer’s eye towards the inclined faces with their downcast eyes; then further down to the bare feet in the clear water, where one glimpses the mother’s right hand moving over her daughter’s skin.
        How easy it was for me to identify with the little girl since I, too, loved to climb into a warm bubble bath during the hour just after sundown when the house still smelled of supper, and the kitchen sounds drifted up to the blue tiled bath on the second floor. I therefore wondered what the mother in Cassatt’s painting was saying, for something about the angle of her face suggested speech of the softest, most intimate nature. So powerful and lasting an impression did “The Bath” make that years later when a friend gave birth to her first child, a daughter, I set up my easel in my parents’ garden and copied the painting for the nursery.
 
In 1877, the year Cassatt began to produce her first important images of mothers and children, she had been living in Paris for just over half a decade. At a time when unmarried women did not traditionally live on their own, the thirty-two-year-old Cassatt believed that her older sister Lydia, who had accompanied her to Paris, would be her lifelong companion.
        That same year, Cassatt’s parents, wealthy and cosmopolitan Philadelphians, joined the artist and her sister in the City of Light. One of Cassatt’s most striking images, “Reading ‘Le Figaro’” (1877-78), depicts her mother, Katherine Cassatt, engrossed in Paris’s leading newspaper. With her black reading glasses perched on her nose and her serious expression, Katherine Cassatt’s strong figure is a study in reassuring absorption.
        In contrast, Cassatt’s paintings of her sister are much more fragile and delicate. The most feminine and quietly flirtatious is “The Cup of Tea” (1882), which one critic pronounced “exquisitely Parisian.” Here Lydia sits in an elegant armchair. Behind her a window box burgeons with blue and white hyacinths. Lydia herself is dressed all in glowing pinks. Her white-gloved hands hold a gold-lipped teacup and saucer, and her chin is nestled in an ample lace collar, the frills echoed along the edges of her sleeves.
        Of all the paintings of Lydia, “The Cup of Tea” most successfully hides the fact that she had recently been diagnosed with Bright’s Disease, an incurable disorder of the kidneys. After Lydia’s diagnosis, Cassatt understood that, once her parents died, she would be left without family surrounding her. After all, her commerce-minded brothers and their wives and children were all settled in the United States; and she herself had no plans to marry given that marriage would inevitably compromise her commitment to her art.
        In “Lydia Crocheting at Marly,” painted in 1880, Cassatt bears witness to her sister’s approaching death. Here Lydia’s face is only tentatively attuned to the knitting in her lap. Her pale features are faintly drawn, and her mouth is unable to smile. “Autumn,” painted around this same time, is even more poignant. This time a black-bonneted Lydia sits on a park bench. The sorrowful coloration resonates even more deeply when considered in the context of the family letters that survive from this period:
 
        Katherine Cassatt to her son, Alexander Cassatt:
                                                                                      April 9 1880
 
        … I suppose your father has written or Gard has told you how ill Lydia
        has been—she doesn’t often get alarmed about herself but this time she
        says she thought it was going to be the last—neuralgia to the stomach is
        far worse than to the head and lasts much longer—it is not a month
        since she was attacked, and although she is able to go out & is getting
        some appetite she still has some uneasiness….
 
        Robert Cassatt to Alexander Cassatt:
                                                                                      July 3, 1882
 
        … I fear also that you will notice a great change for the worse in Lydia’s
        appearance…. She has now had a long interval from severe
        suffering—only one of her bad headache attacks since last week in May
        & that one did not last as long as usual—But then the other symptoms
        which alarmed us so in the winter & early spring have reappeared….
 
        Mary Cassatt did not paint for six months after her sister’s death on November 7, 1882. When she did resume work, it was as if she were revisiting her identity as a child and seeking a visual language for expressing the intimacy between women and children. “Mrs. Cassatt Reading to her Grandchildren” (1888), a painting the artist’s mother viewed as an extension of their domestic life together and therefore off limits to buyers, depicts a bespectacled Katherine seated by a window and surrounded by three of her grandchildren. The youngest may face the viewer, but her upturned eyes remain focused on her grandmother, a further testament to their intimacy.
 
More than twenty-five years after my mother’s and my first outing to the Art Institute, a museum that my mother had been visiting since she took a sewing class there in her early twenties, her eyesight had become so poor she required a magnifying glass to read everything from the newspaper to her recipes. Like her father before her, my mother was diagnosed with Fuchs Distrophy, a disease that attacks the cornea. Unlike her father who lost his eyesight in his eighties, my mother was in her very active sixties when the diagnosis was made.
        My parents live in Chicago, and I live in west Texas. The 1,800 miles between us means that I now see them some four times a year. So it was by phone that my mother kept me apprised of her situation and of the upcoming cornea transplant. Still, I did not fully understand how diminished her life had become until my family gathered at my sister’s house in Los Angeles that Christmas.
        Usually we celebrated the holiday at my parents’ home, where my mother prepared both the traditional Russian Orthodox Christmas Eve dinner passed down to her by my father’s mother, as well as a more contemporary Christmas Day dinner. That year we met in L.A. in order to try to institute a new tradition, or at the very least to try to make my mother’s situation—one we hoped would be temporary—easier.
        What my sister and I should have realized was that after thirty years of hosting holiday meals, our energetic mother would insist on playing a role in the cooking. More importantly, we should have anticipated that she would not be able to see the recipes or negotiate my sister’s very different kitchen. We didn’t. As a result, we looked on helplessly as our mother pressed her face very close to the page of a cookbook, struggled to find the cinnamon in my sister’s extensive spice rack, and later panicked because she could not read the settings on the gas stove.
        All through that holiday, I prayed that the cornea transplant in January would be successful. Otherwise I feared that my mother, who had been running for twenty-five years and had taken up yoga at sixty-four, would deteriorate along with her eyesight, as the disorienting events of that Christmas seemed to suggest. Such a possibility was especially cruel given that my mother had cared for her own father during his final years; and later for my father’s mother, who eventually died at ninety-four, following an extremely difficult final month.
        After more than eight years of intensive and exhausting care-taking, I had hoped that these losses—despite the void they left in our family—would ultimately prove enabling for my mother. At the very least, I had hoped they would give her back the gift of her own time. Now that she could no longer see, however, the question became what would she do with such a gift if the surgery did not prove successful?
 
After her father’s death on December 7, 1891, Mary Cassatt, age forty-six, and her mother, age seventy-five, drew even closer together. In the years that followed, Cassatt and her mother traveled to the Cap d’Antibes in the south of France. There they rented a villa, and there Cassatt, who was becoming increasingly well known and was honored with her first Paris retrospective in 1893, kept up a steady stream of correspondence with artists, collectors, and museum agents, as well as with her own dealer.
        In the summer of 1893, Cassatt completed one major composition on the Cap d’Antibes. The painting now known as “The Boating Party” depicts a woman holding a child in her lap while her husband, whose back is to the viewer, rows the boat. Despite its compositional harmony, most evident in the way the boat’s curved lines are echoed in the fluid arc of the billowing sail, the faces of Cassatt’s subjects—in particular those of the mother and child whom we view head on—are strangely impassive. This impression introduces the noteworthy fact that Cassatt hired local people as models for this painting. Unlike her depictions of Lydia or of the other mothers and children, many of whom were among her family and friends, these people were strangers without any connection to the artist.
        During her time on the Cap d’Antibes, Cassatt bought her first house, the Château de Beaufresne. True, she was an accomplished artist and a woman nearing middle age. Nevertheless, while her father was alive he continued to control their housing situation. Only after his death did the funds and the financial authority go to Mary Cassatt and her mother. Initially enthusiastic about her first permanent residence in France, Cassatt’s enthusiasm waned as renovations ate up more and more of her time. To make the situation even more difficult, her mother had become ill, and Cassatt was the primary caretaker. In one of her letters she confessed, “What I want is the freedom to work.”
        Instead, Katherine Cassatt’s health continued to worsen once mother and daughter returned to Paris in the autumn of 1894. That December, Katherine Cassatt contracted influenza.
 
        Mary Cassatt to the painter, Rose Lamb
                                                                          April 26, 1895
 
        … My mother has been often ill & I often nurse for weeks at a time, &
        this last winter ever since 10th of Dec she has been a victim to grippe.
        She is now up & goes out but is still very ill, she says to tell you that the
        woman you knew as my Mother is no more, that only a poor creature is
        left! Which proves that her head is affected & the depression is at times
        very great. In fact life seems very dark to me just now….
 
        Katherine Cassatt’s health prevented her daughter from even considering the long ocean journey to New York for the exhibition, and that summer Cassatt and her mother finally settled into their new home. In late August the artist’s American friend, the collector and feminist Louisine Havemeyer, visited with her daughters. While Cassatt nursed her mother, whose health continued to worsen, Louisine tried to alleviate her friend’s suffering by urging her to try to work.
        “Louisine Havemeyer and her daughter Electra,” a pastel, is the extraordinary result of this time. Pictured in partial profile, the pale gold of Louisine is paired with the creamy pinks and whites of her daughter whose dress spills over onto Louisine’s lap. Mother and daughter sit side by side on a poppy-colored loveseat. Although the daughter’s left arm is draped around her mother’s neck, each sitter seems absorbed in her own thoughts while giving the impression of being present and attuned to the other. Essential to this effect is the space that Cassatt has subtly created between mother and daughter. It begins with the distance between their level eyes, then travels to the center of their chests, and ultimately extends to their clasped hands.
        The pastel allows for several possible interpretations. The most compelling suggests that Cassatt was already grieving at the time of her mother’s dying—hence the gravity of her sitters. Simultaneously, she was anticipating the identity— her own—that would come to fill the space symbolically bodied forth in the pastel of a close friend and her child. In my interpretation, it is a space that resonates with the strength and continuity to be found among generations of women.
 
My own mother is the eldest of three daughters. Thirty-five years ago, my mother’s sister Irene died of ovarian cancer. Erika, the youngest, never recovered from that loss. My mother credits her own ability to heal from her sister’s death—and from the death of her mother, also from reproductive cancer, just six years later—to the fact that she had two small daughters of her own. I was three, and my sister just a baby, when Irene went into the hospital for the last time. (In that strange way of things, my mother learned that she was pregnant with my sister on the day that Irene’s exploratory surgery yielded the discovery of a malignant tumor on her ovary.) “You and Christine gave me hope,” my mother told me more than once.
        Unlike my mother, my aunt Erika never had children of her own. My mother has never asked her sister why not—“because,” my mother said, “ours is not that kind of relationship.” Even though the sisters celebrate most holidays together, spent almost two years repairing their late father’s house, and talk regularly on the telephone, my mother cannot ask Erika about one of the most life-defining choices of any woman’s life. The reason she cannot goes all the way back to the despondent weeks their sister Irene, herself a nurse, spent as a patient in the hospital. Outside crocuses and daffodils budded forth from the thawing earth; but within, Irene’s body continued to be wasted by the cancer. My aunt Erika and my grandmother stayed with Irene all day every day. Because she had two small children to care for, my mother never lingered in the sickroom for very long. My mother believes that Erika has never forgiven her for not being there.
 
 
Unlike the prolonged period of grief and inactivity that followed her sister’s death, after her mother died on October 21, 1895, Cassatt quickly returned to work and produced a large number of paintings and pastels during the next two years.
 
        Mary Cassatt to Eugenie Heller
                                                                                      February 1, 1896
 
        … My sister-in-law, Miss Hallowell, & I are going this week to St.
        Quentin for the day. In the Musée of St. Quentin are eighty pastels of
        Latour which I very much wish to see….There are Latour’s in the
        Louvre, but the St. Quentin ones are celebrated. He was an artist, most
        simple most sincere, no “brio,” no facility of execution, but his portraits
        are living & full of character…
 
One of the most important developments in Cassatt’s style during these years was her turn away from the Impressionist movement she had joined at Edgar Degas’s invitation in 1873. Now she began to study the pastel technique of the eighteenth century master Maurice Quentin de La Tour. She traveled to Italy and Spain and found herself profoundly influenced by sixteenth and seventeenth century artists such as Veronese, el Greco, and Boticelli.
 
        Mary Cassatt to Theodate Pope
                                                                                      February 19, 1911
 
        … Everyone has their criterion of beauty. I confess I love health &
        strength. What would you say to the Boticelli Madonna in the Louvre.
        The peasant girl and her child clothed in beautiful shifts & wrapped in
        soft veils. Degas pointed out to me Botticelli stretched his life of truth to
        the point of painting her hands with the fingernails worn down with
        field work! Come over & I will go to the Louvre with you & teach you to
        see the Old Masters methods….
 
        A later work, “The Caress” (1902), powerfully dramatizes how far from her Impressionist beginnings Cassatt ultimately traveled. Here a golden-haired girl of two leans against her mother, whose evergreen dress creates a luxurious backdrop for the apricot-warmth of the child’s skin. Just behind the child, an older sister leans forward to kiss her on the right cheek. The long flowing lines of the child’s body and the velvety finish of the paint, in particular the Greco-esque depths of color, are strongly evocative of the works Cassatt so admired.
        Cassatt’s immersion in the techniques of the old masters was accompanied by a renewed focus in portraiture. I believe that Cassatt’s increasing affinity for this genre must have been partly subconscious. As she grieved for her mother, she must have found solace in spending time with and painting the people she loved most. Among these people was her namesake niece, Ellen Mary or “Elsie” Cassatt.
        “Ellen Mary Cassatt in a White Coat” (1896) allows absolutely nothing to distract the viewer’s gaze from the child. Seated on a chair fitted exactly to her size, her hands placed firmly on the wooden armrests, Ellen Mary wears a white coat trimmed with sable. The little girl portrayed here is not seeking out a mother’s reassuring arm or steadying gaze. No, she seems absolutely self-possessed, a latter-day Infanta on an unadorned throne. This remarkable portrait of Ellen Mary—so different from Cassatt’s other work which privileges relationship over any one individual—inevitably begs the question: was the artist painting a vision of herself into this portrait of the independent girl?
 
In the weeks that followed my mother’s surgery, she was forced to lie on her back for most of the day in order to allow her eye to heal. Meanwhile, I spent my days in the English department of a university in west Texas and imaginatively traversed the 1800 miles between us. I pictured my mother in her bed listening to WGN Radio, a station she has loved for as long as I can remember, or training her ear to the winter sounds beyond her bedroom window. Although my mother did not once complain, I remained profoundly aware of the fact that she was unable to partake of the activities she loved most; unable even fix herself a bowl of oatmeal, or read the editorial pages of The Chicago Tribune.
        For the first time in her life my mother’s situation forced her to live with her own thoughts—to really abide within them—a fact that stays with me. Yes, my mother attended Mass every Sunday morning and rose before dawn to run, read the newspaper, and ready the house for the day, but she had never been in the habit of reflection or stillness. And yet, I often asked myself, what else was there for her during those weeks when she had to lie still, her newly repaired eye covered by gauze? There was prayer certainly. My mother told me that she prayed. But what else?
        Did my mother return to the months surrounding Irene’s death, reminded of the fact that her sister refused to admit that she was dying, thereby preventing her family from being able to confront their grief until it came time to bury her? Did she revisit the plight of Irene’s four-year-old daughter, Ria, who was soon ferried a continent away from her mother’s family when her father moved back to his native Germany just a few months after Irene’s death?
        Or was it the loss of her own mother that my mother remembered, a loss she still cannot speak about, at least not for long, in part because she believes she did wrong by my grandmother—by not visiting more often, by being so absorbed in her own life—before my grandmother was diagnosed with uterine cancer.
        All I know about my grandmother’s dying is that the last time they went to see her in the hospital my grandfather brought with him a pine cone. “Why?” I asked, inevitably reminded of the one hundred, thriving pine trees that surrounded my widowed grandfather’s acre of American land. “Because,” my mother said, only once, “your grandmother was always on the lookout for seeds. Always on the lookout for any sign of new life.”
 
In old age, Mary Cassatt did not find herself alone as she initially feared. Cassatt’s maid and companion, Mathilde Valet, who joined the household in 1882, remained with the artist for the rest of her life. So too, despite the losses of close artist friends, especially Degas, Cassatt continued to cultivate friendships in France and increasingly in the United States. Her relationships with members of her brothers’ families, particularly with her namesake niece, lasted until her death. So too, after the turn of the century, Cassatt, who had yet another American retrospective in 1898, eventually became a hero for young American artists who came to Paris to work.
        One young American, Anna Thorne, took the train to Beaufresne to meet Cassatt, bringing with her a bouquet of violets. As Thorne remembered: “The inside of the chateau was glorious… at the far end, where the shades were drawn, sitting almost as one on a throne, I saw her, my idol, the painter of “La Loge” and “A Cup of Tea”—Mary Cassatt. We came close. She did not smile, only sat there, arrogantly proud, austere; her white hair done in a precise, little, bright embroidered French cap; her thin hands folded in her lap.”
 
After a series of tentative visits to her surgeon, my mother learned that the cornea transplant had been remarkably successful. Little by little, she began to regain her sight. Within six months, my mother could see more clearly and more vividly than she had in years. On a cool morning in March, she and my father took a trip downtown, traveling via train, then walking those same long blocks to the Art Institute, so that she could celebrate the gift of sight among the paintings she so loved. Later that evening she telephoned. As if seeing the paintings for the first time, she described the subtle gradations of light in one of Monet’s haystack paintings. She spoke of the electric brilliance of Van Gogh’s irises. I believe she even mentioned “The Bath,” singling out the luster of the child’s eyelashes, the luminous whiteness of the porcelain basin.
 
        Mary Cassatt to Louisine Havemeyer
                                                                                      December 28, 1917
 
        … I am nearer despair than I ever was, operating on my right eye before
        the cataract was ripe, was the last drop….The sight of that eye is inferior
        but still I saw a good deal in spite of the cataract now I see scarcely at
         all….
 
        In looking back over my life, how elated I would have been if in my
         youth I had been told I would have the place in the world of Art I have
        acquired and now at the end of life how little it seems, what difference
        does it all make….
 
 
                                                                                      March 22, 1920
 
        … My dear [Louisine] my sight does not permit me to see pictures. The
        sight of the left eye on which all depends is returning very slowly it is 5
        months today since the operation. I see no signs of having sight enough
        to see in the summer….
 
 
Despite a series of operations around the time of the First World War, Cassatt’s eyesight only continued to deteriorate during the last decade of her life. Having spent so many years of her life caring for her sister and later for her mother, the artist had hoped that old age would be her most productive. Instead, Cassatt found herself unable to paint and had to struggle to retain her convictions regarding art’s value, including the value of her own contributions. She died on June 14, 1926.
 
 
For a long time I believed the practice of my art, complemented by the vocation of teaching, was enough. Although I thought abstractly of the possibility of having a child, I never dwelled on it for very long. Now in my late thirties, instead of dreaming of book contracts and literary honors, I increasingly imagine myself with a child in my arms; a child with whom I can share the wonder of autumn leaves, a cat’s whiskers, first snow. Were I to explore this shift, I would inevitably point to the fact of my parents’ aging. These days, every time I step off the airplane and find them waiting in Arrivals, I see how stiffly my father moves; I notice the arthritis throttling my mother’s hands; my eyes trace the pervading thinness of her body; and I realize they will not always be with me.
        Still, my desire for a child is not only driven by loss. The trumpeting patterns of the migrating geese have everything to do with it, as does the watercolor light of early morning, not to mention the joy that erupts when I rediscover a book read to me when I was very young, or experience the rush of standing before a painting I love, and find myself eager to share what I find there.
        On my last visit to the Art Institute, I once again approached “The Bath.” But this time I did not concentrate on the artist’s brushstrokes or try to figure out how Cassatt created the light that slants across the mother’s hand and the porcelain basin. This last time, I believe, I looked at the painting as I must have all those years ago when Cassatt’s child and I were at most two or three years apart. Back then, I would listen for my mother’s approach, longing to feel her hand on my shoulder, longing to hear her ask what it was I saw—what it was I noticed—in Cassatt’s depiction of a mother washing her daughter’s feet in a quiet room at the end of another century.