Woman Bathing

American painter and printmaker Mary Cassatt is known as one of the “three great dames of Impressionism.” While Cassatt painted outside like other Impressionists, she specialized in intimate indoor scenes, frequently depicting women alone as well as mothers and children. This print of a woman bathing shows the casual intimacy of a daily ritual. Cassatt’s Impressionist contemporary, Edgar Degas, also famously depicted bathing women. Yet whereas Degas’s portraits, in their high angle gaze and their fixation on the women’s rears, tend to have a voyeuristic quality, Cassatt’s depiction is profoundly humanizing in its mundanity. In her use of flat, bounded color, Cassatt borrowed from Japanese block print aesthetics. Impressionist artists, as other French creatives at the time, were heavily influenced by Japanese art, revealing modernism to be transnational in origin.