Life and career
Cassatt was an American artist who built her career chiefly in France and exhibited with the Impressionists. She explored women’s social lives and relationships between adults and children. Japanese prints helped stimulate her colour-print experiments around 1890; pastel and painting remained important alongside her graphic work.
Works across a career
Selected examples, not a complete catalogue. Read date ranges and attributions before inferring a career sequence.
- 01
c. 1889
c. 1889
After-Dinner Coffee (recto)
- Material / technique
- graphite
- Attribution / role
- Museum attribution
- Collection / source
- The Cleveland Museum of Art
Museum catalogue note
Cassatt exhibited prints for the first time in 1880 at the fifth Impressionist exhibition. As the decade progressed, she continued to show her graphic work alongside pastels and paintings. In the spring of 1890, at the Deuxième Exposition de Peintres-Graveurs, she showed a group of drypoints, remarkable in their delicacy and precision, as well as a group of prints made with a combination of aquatint and softground etching that appeared quickly drawn and spontaneous. After-Dinner Coffee is a study for a softground etching with aquatint.
Collection text · The Cleveland Museum of Art · CC0 - 02
1890–91
1890–91
In the Omnibus
- Material / technique
- color drypoint and aquatint
- Attribution / role
- Museum attribution
- Collection / source
- The Cleveland Museum of Art
Museum catalogue note
This print belongs to a series of color etchings created by Mary Cassatt between 1890 and 1891. Each was influenced by the artist's study of Japanese woodblock prints, especially in their use of flat planes of color and domestic subject matter. In the scene depicted here, a middle-class woman accompanies her nursemaid and child on errands throughout Paris. The group rides in an omnibus, a form of public transportation where different genders and classes could intermingle. While the nanny's attention stays focused on her young charge, the female subject appears distracted, gazing toward the world beyond.
Collection text · The Cleveland Museum of Art · CC0 - 03
1901
1901
After the Bath
- Material / technique
- pastel
- Attribution / role
- Museum attribution
- Collection / source
- The Cleveland Museum of Art
Museum catalogue note
Mary Cassatt began using pastel in the 1870s and continued to experiment with the medium throughout her career. This drawing depicts a mother and child, one of the artist's preferred subjects. Cassatt typically used the technique seen here, in which she finished her sitters' faces with a high degree of detail but rendered the rest of the composition in a much looser and sketchier style.
Collection text · The Cleveland Museum of Art · CC0
Compare materials, style and colour
The graphite study, colour print In the Omnibus and later pastel After the Bath show three ways to organise intimate encounters. Compare line against broad colour areas and the softer or more broken texture of pastel. The shift in medium changes surface and reproducibility, not simply the emotional seriousness of the subject.
Material
What can this material do? Distinguish a design, an original object and a later impression or cast.
Style
Compare viewpoint, edges, composition and marks. Which choices persist, and which change?
Colour
Compare palette, contrast and light. Consider the support, printing, surface treatment and ageing.
Sources and further reading
Original educational interpretation; catalogue descriptions are separately credited. Each study links to its source. Reference entries without images are not added to the comparison timeline.