Human Verified
The Boating Party
by Mary Cassatt
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 90 x 117.3 cm (35 7/16 x 46 3/16 inches)
- Year
- 1893 ... 1894
- Availability
- In a museum collection, not for sale
- Collection
- National Gallery of Art, Washington
- Accession Number
- 1963.10.94
- Credit Line
- Chester Dale Collection
- Copyright
- Public domain
Description
A woman holds a baby in the stern of a small boat while a man rows. Cassatt cuts the composition into hard arcs of citron and blue, so the picture reads almost as flat shapes before it reads as people. It was the centerpiece of her first solo exhibition in the United States in 1895.
How It Was Made, and What Changed
Cassatt had been studying Japanese prints, and you can see what she took from them here: flat pattern, simplified color and an angle you would not choose by accident. After 1893 she spent summers at Antibes on the Mediterranean, where the light pushed her toward harder color. The National Gallery of Art notes that the bold geometry puts her alongside Gauguin and Van Gogh rather than behind them.