Mother and Child (Baby Getting Up from His Nap) - Mary Cassatt (ca. 1899)

Getting Up from His Nap)

Oil on canvas

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Mary Cassatt's Mother and Child (Baby Getting Up from His Nap), painted circa 1899, depicts a beautifully dressed woman tending to a young toddler, translating the Impressionist theme of the female bather into an intimate scene of maternal care. The painting is executed in oil on canvas with rich color and an unconventional treatment of pictorial space that distinguishes Cassatt's mature style within the Impressionist movement. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1844, Cassatt spent much of her career in France, where she became the only American artist to exhibit with the French Impressionists; the mother-and-child theme became her defining subject after approximately 1890. The work holds particular institutional significance as the first painting by Cassatt to enter the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acquired through the George A. Hearn Fund in 1909.