Mr. and Mrs. Cassatt Reading

Mary Cassatt

Soft ground etching in black on laid paper

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Mr. and Mrs. Cassatt Reading is a soft-ground etching by American Impressionist Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), depicting her parents — Robert Simpson Cassatt and Katherine Kelso Cassatt — in an intimate domestic scene of shared reading. The work belongs to a body of prints Cassatt produced during her intensive engagement with printmaking in the late 1870s and 1880s, a period in which her close collaboration with Edgar Degas profoundly shaped her technical approach to the medium. Cassatt's family members served as frequent subjects during these years, providing her with trusted and readily available models within the private domestic sphere that defined much of her subject matter as a woman artist in nineteenth-century Paris. The etching exemplifies her skill in rendering quiet, everyday moments with elegance and psychological intimacy, hallmarks of her broader Impressionist practice.