Mary Cassatt - Mother Holding a Child in Her arms 1890
Mother Holding a Child in Her arms 1890
81x65cm oil on canvas
Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, Bilbao, Spain
The image is only being used for informational and educational purposes
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From Bilbao Fine Arts Museum:
Mothers and their children were a common theme in Cassat’s oeuvre and can be read as modern secular versions of traditional representations of the Virgin Mary and Child, divested of all religious symbolism and transformed into everyday domestic scenes. The composition, which has a reduced colour range, presents a little boy in the arms of his mother. She has her back to us and seems to be concentrated on the toilet of the child, who is looking straight at the viewer. The monumental figures are located in a space that is barely described save for the pitcher and the washbasin on the left, although the armchair—the back of which occupies the foreground of the composition—suggests it is a pleasant bourgeois interior. Alongside Berthe Morisot and Marie Bracquemond, Cassat was one of the few female artists associated with Impressionism.