The archive / Impressionism / The Child's Bath
The Child's Bath
Mary Cassatt · 1844–1926
3 variations + a matched story print, every standard frame ratio. sRGB · up to 300 DPI · personal-use license.
Print it your way — at home, a local shop, or a gallery print delivered to your door. See the printing guide →
Sizes in the download
Print-ready files at every standard frame ratio below — the full image, nothing cropped:
The print is crisp at 300 DPI up to about 24×36″, and stays sharp at 150 DPI from across the room, out to about 40×60″.
[ Will it fit your frame? ]
THE WORK
An ordinary moment, seen from above.
A woman bends a small child toward the basin, and we watch from somewhere above their heads, looking down. The faces are foreshortened, compressed as a real onlooker leaning in would actually see them. It is the angle of a witness caught at the door, not a posed scene. That high vantage came from Cassatt's friend and mentor, the fellow Impressionist Edgar Degas.
WHERE IT CAME FROM
Paris had just discovered the Japanese print.
The bold flat patterns, the firm outlines, the floor that tips up toward the viewer instead of lying back in space: these are the first things the eye registers, and Cassatt took them from Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. She had seen them at a large Paris exhibition in 1890 and was captivated. The painting's most distinctive look was lifted, by her own study, straight from those prints.
LOOK CLOSER
Her name is written on the floor.
Drop your eyes to the lower left, down onto the depicted floor, and the signature is there in blue paint: Mary Cassatt. Most painters tuck a name into a corner margin, outside the scene. Cassatt put hers inside the picture, on the very floor where the washing happens. You have to look down to find it.
Seriously, you must not miss that. You who want to make color prints you couldn't dream of anything more beautiful. I dream of it and don't think of anything else but color on copper.— Mary Cassatt, in a letter to Berthe Morisot, 1890
The file & the facts
- Title
- The Child's Bath
- Artist
- Mary Cassatt
- Year
- 1893
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Original
- 101.3 × 67.3 cm
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Rights
- Public-domain painting · open access · Art Institute of Chicago — Robert A. Waller Fund, 1910.2 (CC0, courtesy)
- File
- sRGB · JPEG · 150–300 DPI
