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We look slightly down onto a young woman sitting in an upholstered chair and tightly hugging a nude, blond child in this vertical, colored print. Both have pale, peach-toned skin. The woman’s black hair is pulled back though a couple tendrils curl on her forehead. Her eyes are downcast and her pink lips parted. She wears a long, cream-white dress dotted with blush-pink, petal-like forms. One arm is under the baby’s chubby bottom and the other braces the child behind the shoulders. The baby wraps their arms around the woman’s neck so they are cheek to cheek. The chair sits in front of a bed with a boxy frame and a pillowy white mattress. The upholstery on the woman’s chair and the wallpaper behind her are patterned with dusky rose-pink flowers and vines against butter yellow. The floor is coral orange. The artist signed the print in graphite under the lower right corner, “Mary Cassatt.”

Mary Cassatt

Maternal Caress, 1890-1891

Not on View

Medium

color drypoint, aquatint, and softground etching on wove paper

Dimensions

plate: 36.4 x 26.4 cm (14 5/16 x 10 3/8 in.)

sheet: 42.5 x 31.4 cm (16 3/4 x 12 3/8 in.)

Credit Line

Gift of Miss Elisabeth Achelis

Catalogue Raisonné

Mathews and Shapiro 1989, no. 12, vi/vi

Accession Number

1942.6.33

Artists / Makers

Mary Cassatt (artist) American, 1844 - 1926

Image Use

This image is in the public domain.
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Inscription

recto: below image at right in graphite: Mary Cassatt; verso: at lower left in graphite in later hand: A81689; at lower right in graphite in later hand: FVX / [indecipherable] 8067 / [indecipherable] c o u

Marks and Labels

recto: none; verso: Elisabeth Achelis (Lugt 824b) and National Gallery of Art

Provenance

Elisabeth Achelis (1880-1973), New York (Lugt 824b)

Associated Names

Achelis, Elisabeth, Miss

Exhibition History

1963: American Artists as Print Makers, Westmoreland County Museum of Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, 1963, no. 45.

1983: Graphic Survey Show, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., July 1983.

2009: The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2009, unnumbered catalogue.

Bibliography

1979: Breeskin, Adelyn Dohme. Mary Cassatt: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Graphic Work. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979, no. 150, iii/iii.

1989: Mathews, Nancy Mowll, and Barbara Stern Shapiro. Mary Cassatt: The Color Prints. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989, no. 12, vi/vi.

1999: Stokstad, Marilyn. Art History, vol. 2. New York: Prentice Hall, 1999, p. 1019, fig. 27.59.

2009: Munroe, Alexandra. The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989. Exh. cat. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2009, pl. 15.