After the Bath (1901): Art, History and Details

After the Bath (1901) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Mary Cassatt (American, 1844–1926).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Mary Cassatt began using pastel in the 1870s and continued to experiment with the medium throughout her career. This drawing depicts a mother and child, one of the artist's preferred subjects. Cassatt typically used the technique seen here, in which she finished her sitters' faces with a high degree of detail but rendered the rest of the composition in a much looser and sketchier style.

Object facts

• Title: After the Bath
• Date: 1901
• Creator attribution: Mary Cassatt (American, 1844–1926)
• Culture: America, late 18th-19th Century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pastel
• Dimensions: Sheet: 66 x 100 cm (26 x 39 3/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - American 19th Century
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1920.379

A detail from the museum

Mary Cassatt once commented that pastel was "the most satisfactory medium for [portraying] children," since they could not sit still for long and the medium allowed for rapid sketching.

Collection credit

Gift of J. H. Wade

Further reading listed by the museum

• W. M. M. "La Sortie Du Bain by Mary Cassatt." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 7, no. 10 (1920): 147-49.
• "Art Awakening Grows in Unexpected Ways." Cleveland Commercial (May 5, 1922).
• An Appreciation of Mary Cassatt's "La Sortie du Bain" in the Wade Collection. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1922.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.