Afternoon Tea Party

1890-1891

Mary Cassatt

Artist, American, 1844 - 1926

Two women with sit next to a table holding a silver tray with royal-blue tea cups and saucers in this colored, vertical drypoint and aquatint. Faint black lines outline the women, their features, clothing, and objects in the room, and each area is filled in a flat, saturated color. The women’s skin is the color of the white paper. The women face each other and take up most of the composition. Both have oval faces, rounded noses, and their hair is pulled up and back. The woman to our right has dark brown hair and leans forward as she holds up a blue plate with her right hand, closer to us. The other hand rests on the arm of her russet-red chair. Her dress is also the color of the paper and has a tight-fitting bodice, long sleeves, and a long skirt. The other woman wears a sapphire-blue cap over black hair. The hat has a celery-green feather and is tied in a bow under the chin. She wears a hip-length, coffee bean-brown cloak over a spruce-green dress. She looks down at the plate and holds what might be a cookie or biscuit with one hand and a cup and a dish-like saucer with the other. Her lips are downturned and her head pulled slightly back to create a double chin. She sits upright in another muted red chair. In the lower right corner of the sheet, the round, smoky-purple table is barely bigger than the round gray tray it holds. On it are two more cups and saucers and a jug, presumably holding milk. What might be another cup-and-saucer set or the teapot is cut off by the right edge of the paper. The rims of the cups and saucers are painted gold. A turquoise-blue screen with openings across the top stands to the left behind the second woman, and a window is behind the first. Spiky green fronds of a houseplant angle up toward the sunlight and a curtain is pulled to the left side. Squiggles and flowers printed in rust red suggest a pattern on both curtains, which are the color of the paper. The artist’s initials are written in graphite under the lower left corner of the printed image, “MC.”

Media Options

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Artwork overview

  • Medium

    color drypoint and aquatint with touches of gold metallic paint on laid paper

  • Credit Line

    Rosenwald Collection

  • Dimensions

    plate: 34.77 × 26.35 cm (13 11/16 × 10 3/8 in.)
    sheet: 48.3 x 31.1 cm (19 x 12 1/4 in.)

  • Accession

    1943.3.2743

  • Catalogue Raisonné

    Mathews and Shapiro 1989, no. 13, iv/v


Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Ambroise Vollard, Paris, France

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1945

  • Blair-Lee House, Washington, D.C., 1945-1962.

1963

  • Prints and Drawings by Mary Cassatt, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1963.

1989

  • Mary Cassatt: The Color Prints, National Gallery of Art, Washington; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamston, MA, 1989-1990, no. 13-IV, repro.

Bibliography

1979

  • Breeskin, Adelyn Dohme. Mary Cassatt: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Graphic Work. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979, no. 151, iii/iv.

1989

  • Mathews, Nancy Mowll, and Barbara Stern Shapiro. Mary Cassatt: The Color Prints. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989, no. 13, iv/v.

Inscriptions

recto: below image, at left, in graphite: M.C.; at bottom center, in graphite, in later hand: C.; verso: none

Markings

none

Watermarks

BAS [fragment]

Wikidata ID

Q64960337


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