Gathering Fruit

Mary Cassatt settled permanently in France in the 1870s when she was in her 30s. There she became friends with Edgar Degas and the Impressionists and exhibited with them in four of their eight Impressionist exhibitions held from 1874 to 1886 – the only American artist invited to do so, and one of very few women. After 1900, Cassatt became known primarily as a painter of mothers and children engaged in domestic activities and casually presented, as opposed to formally posed. In Gathering Fruit, Cassatt employs compositional techniques used in Japanese prints, such as cropping both sides of the picture to give the viewer a glimpse of an intimate moment, as well as applying flat areas of color. To achieve a painterly effect, rather than carving woodblocks in the Japanese print tradition, Cassatt used drypoint, soft-ground etching, and aquatint techniques on copper plates with printer’s ink. Based on the central panel of Modern Woman, an oil mural Cassatt created for a prominent Chicago art collector, in this print, the woman on the ladder offers a baby a cluster of grapes, symbolic of the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next.