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(lively music)
Beth: Looking at this painting by Mary Cassatt,
called The Child's Bath, at the Art Institute of Chicago,
reminds me of how little we see this subject
in art history of a mother and a daughter
and the intimacy that they share.
We do see a mother and child.
Steven: Quite a bit.
That would be the Madonna and the young Christ,
but that's a spiritual image.
By the time we get to the late 19th Century,
that's a much less common image than it was
during the Renaissance or the Baroque.
Beth: There's an intimacy here that feels
so familiar to me, and it brings back memories of
holding my own daughter on my lap.
Steven: I'm really struck by these passages
where the tactile experience of
these figures seems just overwhelming.
Look at the way in which the mother seems to press
against the top of the foot as it's held from below,
and look at the way the child, in response,
seems to replicate the pressure that the mother
is applying as she presses into her own thigh.
Beth: Then there's this lovely way that the child
seems a little bit trepidatious, and leans back.
And the part that I like best is the way that
the mother seems to be speaking to her.
Mouth is slightly opened, and she seems to be maybe
telling her a story, or saying something reassuring.
Steven: I love the way that the child is also sort of
bracing herself against her mother's knee.
Beth: And her mother puts her left arm
around the child to steady her.
There's just wonderful attention
to the child's body here.
Steven: One of the aspects of the painting
that is so convincing is the way in which
their attention is so focused on each other,
and, in a sense, we're drawn into that experience.
They're looking down at the basin
pretty much at the same angle
that Mary Cassatt has placed our perspective.
Beth: We really look sharply down at
these figures in this unusual angle.
It's something that Degas also employed in an effort to
show things in the way that we might really see them,
so that instead of something looking
very composed, the way it normally does,
for example in an academic painting,
we look at things from rather unexpected angles,
the way we do in real life.
Steven: Look for instance at the foreshortened faces.
That's the kind of distortion that
a painter would generally try to avoid.
But perhaps the most stark distortion takes place
in the relationship between the lips of the basin,
where the child's feet are,
and the vase at the lower right.
It's as if they're seen from different perspectives.
Beth: It's incredibly compressed.
We can't see how much space
there is of the room behind them.
There's a sense of patterning throughout
that really flattens the space that might
remind us of Japanese prints.
It's just really pleasurable to look at,
but it's also so obviously a tour de force of painting
by this artist, and I'm really grateful that
she did a painting of a mother and child.
It's just lovely to see.
(lively music)