Mary Cassatt The Child's Bath

Mary Cassatt - The Child's Bath 1893 - Oil on canvas - Art Institute of Chicago

I have been binge watching Call the Midwife on Netflix so that is probably why I have been thinking about babies. My pick for today is American painter Mary Cassatt 1844 - 1926.
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About the Artist from theartstory.com
"By the 1880s, Cassatt was particularly well known for her sensitive depictions of mothers and children. These works, like all her portrayals of women, may have achieved such popular success for a specific reason: they filled a societal need to idealize women's domestic roles at a time when many women were, in fact, beginning to take an interest in voting rights, dress reform, higher education, and social equality. Yet Cassatt's depictions of her fellow upper-middle-class and upper-class women were never simplistic; they contained layers of meaning behind the airy brushwork and fresh colors of her Impressionist technique. Cassatt herself never married or had children, choosing instead to dedicate her entire life to her artistic profession."Mary Cassatt shared and admired progressive attitude of Bertha Honore Palmer, a businesswoman and philanthropist who invited Cassatt to paint a mural for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and who felt that "women should be someone and not something." 

About the painting from Wikipedia In 1891, Mary Cassatt created the oil painting with two subjects, a mother figure and a young child. The genre scene is based on the everyday bathing of a child, a moment that is "special by not being special". The female figure holds up the child firmly and protectively with her left hand while the other hand carefully washes the child's feet. The small and chubby left arm of the child braces against the mother's thigh, while the other hand is clamped firmly on the child's own thigh. The mother's right hand presses firmly but still gently on the foot in the basin, mimicking the child's own pressure on her thigh. To indicate depth, Cassatt painted the faces to recede into space. The paint strokes are layered and rough, creating thick lines that outline the figures and stand them out from the patterned background. The hand of the artist is evident through the roughness of the strokes and can be better viewed from a distance.

Quote 
​"There are two ways for a painter: the broad and easy one or the narrow and hard one."
Mary Cassatt

Resources
https://www.azquotes.com/author/2604-Mary_Cassatt
https://ehttps://www.theartstory.org/artist/cassatt-mary/life-and-legacy/#navn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Cassatt
https://www.pbs.org/call-the-midwife/