About this work
A woman stands at her washstand, the upper part of her bathrobe undone and fallen to her waist, her head partially reflected in the mirror as she washes her face and upper body.
The composition layers multiple patterns — green and pink stripes in her gown, yellow and brown leaf decorations on the blue carpet, and similar leaves on the jug — while the blue-green wall and the curve of the woman's exposed back give this quiet setting a slightly off-kilter, animated tension.
The color palette runs earthy and cool — green, blue, and yellow washes that create a painterly quality within an etching. What strikes the eye first is that bare arc of the back: linear, intimate, unselfconscious, and compositionally bold. This is a private moment observed without apology.
Almost immediately after encountering a landmark exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints, Cassatt embarked on an ambitious project of color aquatints based on ukiyo-e models, and *Woman Bathing* was among the ten prints she completed over several intense months in 1890 and 1891.
The work belongs to that group of ten color prints she showed at her first independent exhibition, at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1891.
In it, Cassatt combined an intimate scene from daily life with dynamic formal elements — color, composition, pattern, and shape — inspired by similar choices in work by Japanese printmakers such as Utagawa Hiroshige.
She used aquatint to create large flat areas of color aesthetically similar to those of Japanese woodblock prints. The print's reception was immediate: the abstract, linear quality of the nude's back drew the attention of Edgar Degas himself, who exclaimed, "I do not admit that a woman can draw like that."
*Woman Bathing (La Toilette)* earned Cassatt widespread acclaim — so much so that in 1976 it set the record for the highest price paid at auction for a print by an American artist, regardless of gender.
As wall art, *Woman Bathing* rewards a room with considered light and some quiet to it — a bedroom, a dressing room, a study where the day slows down. The series to which it belongs is remarkable for its clarity and elegance of composition, its flat abstract patterning, and a powerful economy of line — portraits of women absorbed in the day-to-day rhythms of their lives.
Most importantly, the women are viewed sympathetically: they are not the objects of a male gaze. It speaks to a viewer drawn to works that are formally inventive without being cold — prints that carry the weight of art history lightly while remaining, above all
