About this work
*Woman Washing Hands* is a drypoint with color aquatint — a work that pulls the viewer into a private, unhurried moment of domestic life. A woman bends over a basin, absorbed in the ritual of washing, her figure rendered with the characteristic economy and precision of Cassatt's printmaking hand. The composition employs a number of Japanese-inspired devices: unusual viewpoints, flat areas of color, strong diagonals, the flattening of forms, and a pronounced emphasis on pattern and line.
The palette — dusty blue, pink, umber, and green — is drawn directly from the subdued color schemes of eighteenth-century Japanese prints, particularly those of Kitagawa Utamaro. The result is a scene at once intimate and formally rigorous: a woman apparently unaware of being observed, caught mid-gesture, surrounded by the quiet geometry of a well-appointed room.
In 1890, Cassatt saw an exhibition of more than seven hundred Japanese prints at the École des Beaux-Arts; though she was already fascinated by Japanese art and culture, the exhibition compelled her to recognize the prints' value in her own art, and she almost immediately embarked on an ambitious project of color aquatints based on ukiyo-e models.
Working intensely over several months in 1890 and 1891, Cassatt completed a set of ten color aquatints — among the most technically audacious prints made by any Western artist of her era. In 1889, she had bought a printing press — a heavy, bulky piece of equipment that few other artists had in their studios — which one scholar called "a testament to her intellectual investments in printmaking as an experimental enterprise." *Woman Washing Hands*, held today in the Worcester Art Museum, belongs squarely to this extraordinary creative moment, and to Cassatt's larger project of elevating the private lives and rituals of women into the realm of serious art.
This print rewards contemplative living spaces: a study, a bedroom, a hallway where morning light enters at an angle. Its muted palette and interior calm make it equally at home alongside contemporary furniture and in more traditional rooms. A stunning example of Cassatt's skill in aquatint combined with her extraordinary sense of color, it speaks to viewers drawn to work that finds significance in the overlooked — the person who understands that a woman washing her hands, rendered with this much attention, is not a minor subject at all, but a declaration about whose daily life is worth seeing.
