| dc.description | Of the numerous canvases Cassatt devoted to the mother and child relationship, the Murdock Collections Mother and Child ranks among the finest. In this tranquil scene, a mother tenderly embraces her child, while the child reaches up to caress the mothers chin. The two figures, while clearly painted from actual models, ultimately transcend their specific identities to embody the abstract ideal of the intimate bond between mother and child. The brushwork and spatial conception themselves tend toward abstraction, as if to under score the level of generality to which the image aspires. Cassatt flattens space by cropping the body of the mother, asserting the decorative pattern of her dress, and suppressing spatial recession around her; light-hued background elements, laid in rapidly with sketchy strokes, serve further to flatten the composition and emphasize the picture plane. This phenomenon is demonstrated most dramatically in the water pitcher, which not only responds to the outline of the mother’s head and shoulder, but also serves to deny the space behind the figures. The primary lines of the work, established by the child's legs, the contours of the mother's skirt, and the direction of her glance, lead to the focal point, the child's head.1 Cassatt's brushwork reinforces this compositional emphasis by treating more summarily those elements at the periphery of the composition. For example, the child's foot, audaciously simplified, dissolves into the abstract strokes of the mother's skirt. This diffuse aura surrounding the figures serves to distinguish further the parental bond as everlasting in the midst of an ephemeral material world. While Cassatt herself was childless, she seems to have understood something of that intensely private—yet universal—exchange between mothers and their children. | en_US |
