The Child's Bath

Two figures fill the middle of this tall painting: a woman and a young child on her lap. She steadies the child while holding one small foot in a washbasin set below them. The scene is an ordinary moment at home, but the two are pressed close together, and that closeness is what draws you in first. The painting is made with oil paint on canvas and stands about 40 inches high and 26 inches wide, roughly one metre tall, so the figures are close to life-sized in feel.

Notice how steeply you look down on the scene, as if standing above the pair. This squeezes the space so it feels shallow, like a stage with little depth. Now look at the carpeted floor around the figures. Instead of stretching away from you, it seems to stand upright against the surface of the canvas. Then let your eye travel across the whole picture. Pattern appears everywhere, in every part of the frame, and it adds to the flat look. Find the basin below the lap, and see how little room there is around it.

Mary Cassatt, an American artist who worked in France, painted this in 1893. In the 1890s she was deeply engaged with Japanese aesthetics, which means the look and ideas of art from Japan. You can see that interest in the tilted view from above, the flattened space and the all-over pattern. She used oil paint on canvas. The painting was widely exhibited beginning in 1893, so many people had the chance to see it soon after it was made.

This is an extraordinary composition built around a subject Cassatt was known for: people sharing a close, everyday moment. The Art Institute of Chicago bought the painting in 1910, and it became the first work by Cassatt to enter the collection. Before you move on, look once more at the place where the woman's hand meets the child's foot in the water. Everything else in the picture, the pattern, the carpet and the steep view, seems to gather around that small point of touch.