Baby Lying on His Mother s Lap, reaching to hold a scarf 1914

Mary Cassatt made this pastel drawing of a baby and its mother, sometime in the late 1800s, and what grabs me is how she’s built the image out of these strokes of pure colour. It’s all process. You can see how the image is made. Up close, the surface is a flurry of marks, especially in the mother’s blue dress and the orange scarf. It feels so contemporary to see those marks laid bare. It’s a reminder that images are constructed, built up bit by bit, rather than just appearing whole. Look at the baby’s tiny hand reaching for the fabric. Each finger is defined by a slightly different hue, a touch of pink, a dab of blue. Cassatt was clearly influenced by the Impressionists, but there's also something here that anticipates the later expressive colour of someone like Matisse. It’s like she's saying, hey, art is an ongoing conversation, a messy, beautiful, and unfinished experiment.