La gita in barca

Cassatt painted this over the winter of 1893 and 1894 at Antibes on the French Riviera, working under a hard Mediterranean sun that pushed her toward flatter, bolder colour. A few years earlier she had seen a large show of Japanese woodblock prints in Paris, then wildly fashionable, and their lessons run all through the picture. The composition is cropped and tilted, the boatman a broad dark shape whose back fills the near corner, the sail a plain yellow curve, the whole surface arranged in flat patterned panels. He rows a mother and her fidgeting child across bright water. The oar cuts a strong diagonal that pins the three of them together at the centre of the boat.