Mother's Goodnight Kiss

Mary Cassatts Mothers Goodnight Kiss from 1888 is a pastel on paper that exemplifies the American Impressionist painters approach to the subject of mothers and children that dominated her mature work and made her one of the most celebrated artists of the late 19th century. Cassatt, who was the only American artist to exhibit with the French Impressionists and one of the few women to achieve international recognition as an artist in the 19th century, developed a style of pastel drawing that combined the broken color and chromatic richness of Impressionism with the intimate domestic subject matter that was available to women artists who were excluded from the public spaces where male artists found their subjects. Mothers Goodnight Kiss depicts a mother bending over a child to give a bedtime kiss, a subject that allows Cassatt to explore the physical intimacy and emotional depth of the mother-child relationship without the sentimentality that male artists typically brought to similar subjects. The pastel medium, with its capacity for soft edges and chromatic richness, allows Cassatt to model the figures with a tactile immediacy that oil painting cannot match, creating a sense of physical presence that is appropriate to the intimate subject. The blue-gray wove paper, now faded to tan, originally provided a cool ground that set off the warm flesh tones and pastel colors of the figures, and the mounting on canvas and strainer suggests that the work was considered important enough to be treated as a painting rather than a drawing.

Cassatts pastels of mothers and children are among the most celebrated works of American Impressionism, and their influence on the representation of women and children in Western art extends from the Impressionists to the feminist artists of the late 20th century. Mothers Goodnight Kiss exemplifies the combination of Impressionist technique and domestic subject matter that made her work significant.

A 1888 pastel by Cassatt on blue-gray paper depicting a mother bending to give a child a bedtime kiss, combining Impressionist broken color with the intimate domestic subject matter and tactile immediacy that make her pastels among the most celebrated works of American Impressionism.