About this work
The eye enters *The Boating Party* from an unexpected angle: a high vantage that gives an oblique, bird's-eye view into the boat.
The scene depicts an unknown woman, baby, and man in a sailboat, with Cassatt using bold, dark colors to depict the boatman and bright yellow to contrast the boat and its passengers — the child held in the woman's lap, the man facing them with his back to us.
The woman's wool suit is a soft blue-grey with striking lines of coral pink plaid, her figure luminous against the boatman's near-black silhouette. Citron and blue carve strong arcs that divide the picture into assertive, almost abstract shapes.
Azure-blue water surrounds the boat up to a high horizon line that brushes the top edge of the painting, while the shoreline in the distance is lined with trees and dotted with white houses with red roofs. The compression is deliberate and vertiginous — the "powerful dark silhouette of the boatman" and the angle of the oar "thrust powerfully into the centre of the composition towards the mother and child."
Cassatt painted *The Boating Party* during the winter of 1893–1894 in Antibes, on the French Riviera.
Measuring nearly three by four feet, it is one of her largest and most ambitious paintings. The work sits at a pivotal crossroads in her development: art historian Adelyn Breeskin notes that Impressionism, Japanese printmaking, and Correggio's *Madonna and Child* all shaped its style, and the synthesis is unlike anything else in her catalogue. Through Cassatt's strong graphic shapes, we can see how Impressionist painting evolved to become more experimental and geometric in the 1890s.
With its bold geometry and decorative patterning of the surface, this picture positions Cassatt alongside such Post-Impressionist painters as Gauguin and Van Gogh.
It was the centerpiece of Cassatt's first solo exhibition in the United States in 1895 — and it was a work she kept for herself for decades, writing in 1914 that it held deep personal meaning, having been painted "at Antibes 20 years ago — the year my niece came into the world."
This is a painting for a room with presence. Its palette — deep navy, sharp citron, pale green sail, Mediterranean blue — anchors rather than decorates, making it best suited to a space that can hold a strong graphic statement:
