In April 1890 the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris hung a very large exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints. Mary Cassatt went, went again, and wrote to Berthe Morisot telling her to come as soon as she could. Almost everything strange about The Child's Bath three years later came out of that room.
The letter to Morisot
What she wrote was direct. Anyone who wanted to make colour prints could not dream of anything more beautiful, she said; she could think of nothing but colour on copper. Then a postscript: you must see the Japanese, come as soon as you can.
She did more than look. Within a year she had made a set of ten colour prints of her own, in drypoint and aquatint, pulled with a professional printer called Leroy whose name she wrote on the sheets beside her own. One of that set is in the same museum as the painting.
What she took from the prints was not the subject matter. It was the way they build a space: looking down into it, pattern laid over pattern, and the shadows left out.
The floor stands up
The Child's Bath was painted in 1893 and it is a metre tall. The viewpoint is from above and a little behind, steep enough that the carpeted floor does not recede at all. It comes up and lies flat against the surface of the canvas.
There is pattern everywhere and almost none of it agrees: a striped dress against a flowered carpet against a jug with a design of its own. There is practically no shadow anywhere, which takes away the last of the depth.
She signed it at the bottom left in blue paint, down on the floor, which is not where a signature in a European painting usually goes. None of this is accidental and all of it is in the prints.
Two heads and a basin
What the whole arrangement is for is a very ordinary minute. A woman has a child on her lap with one arm round her and holds the child's foot in a basin of water with the other hand. Both heads are bent the same way at the same angle. Neither of them looks out.
The flattened floor and the piled-up pattern do not decorate the scene. They close it, so the eye has no way out of the picture.
It was widely shown from 1893 onwards, and in 1910 the Art Institute of Chicago bought it — the first work by Cassatt the museum owned. She was in her late forties by then and had been exhibiting with the Impressionists in Paris since 1879.
Three years after one exhibition, the floor is standing up. The rest of the picture is one quiet minute.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.