Children Playing on the Beach

Mary Cassatt was an American who had thrown in her lot with the Paris Impressionists, and by 1884 she was known for her scenes of mothers and children indoors. A beach was unusual for her. That year she had gone with her ailing mother to the Spanish coast for the sea air, and this picture seems to come out of that stay. Two small girls sit close together in the foreground, wholly absorbed in digging, their buckets beside them. Cassatt crops the scene tightly, tilts the sand up toward us, and empties the background of nearly everything, the flattening and off-centre framing she was drawing from the Japanese woodblock prints she had begun to study. She showed the canvas in 1886, at the eighth and last of the Impressionist exhibitions.