Cleveland Museum of Art

After the Bath

Mary Cassatt

Date

1901

Medium

pastel

Culture

America, late 18th-19th Century

Department

Drawings

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

Mary Cassatt began using pastel in the 1870s and continued to experiment with the medium throughout her career. This drawing depicts a mother and child, one of the artist's preferred subjects. Cassatt typically used the technique seen here, in which she finished her sitters' faces with a high degree of detail but rendered the rest of the composition in a much looser and sketchier style. Mary Cassatt once commented that pastel was "the most satisfactory medium for [portraying] children," since they could not sit still for long and the medium allowed for rapid sketching.

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