Mary Cassatt's 'After the Bath': A Modern Madonna

Mary Cassatt's pastel 'After the Bath' (1901) at the Cleveland Museum of Art exemplifies her signature theme of maternal love, reimagining the traditional Madonna and Child. Cassatt faced significant barriers as a woman artist—denied figure drawing classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and barred from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Her meeting with Edgar Degas proved pivotal. The work's energetic pastel application, inventive composition, and flat natural lighting avoid sentimentality, as noted by the museum's 1920 bulletin. Cassatt often used unrelated models for mother-and-child scenes. The article by Jerry N. Weiss appears in the Summer 2026 issue of Pastel Journal.