The Toilette
Mary Cassatt·1890
Historical Context
The Toilette (1890, Brooklyn Museum) is one of the finest products of Cassatt's transformative encounter with Japanese woodblock prints at the 1890 Paris exhibition organized by Samuel Bing. Created as part of a series of large color aquatints — the most sustained and formally radical project of her career — The Toilette shows a woman drying her foot in a pose that draws, in radically different formal terms, on the tradition of the female figure at bath. Japanese influence is pervasive: the steep tilted perspective, the absence of shadows, the flat color areas defined by elegant contour lines.
Technical Analysis
As a color aquatint, the work demonstrates Cassatt's mastery of a technically demanding printmaking process. The print eschews conventional perspective and modeling in favor of flat color areas separated by clean, sinuous outlines. The composition employs the elevated, tilted viewpoint characteristic of Utamaro's bijin-ga prints, with the patterned background creating decorative rhythm.
