The Child's Bath

Cassatt painted this in 1893, a couple of years after a show of Japanese woodblock prints hit Paris and reorganised how she composed. You can see it straight away. We look down on the scene from above, the way those prints so often looked down on theirs, so the two figures tip toward us and the patterned floor and striped dress press flat against the surface. A woman holds a small girl on her lap and washes her feet in a basin, one hand around the child's waist, and neither of them looks out at us. American by birth, Cassatt spent her career in France among the Impressionists, and mothers and children were the subject she returned to more than any other. The whole picture turns on that one point of contact, the woman's hand cupping the child's bare foot in the water.