Mary Cassatt’s Jeannette and her Mother Seated on a Sofa

Mary Cassatt’s 1901 print Jeannette and her Mother Seated on a Sofa (below, left) captures a timeless moment between mother and child:

In this tranquil scene, free of visual distraction or clutter, Jeannette sits securely in her mother’s lap, the mother’s arms surrounding her daughter in a gentle embrace, the two gazing lovingly, eyes fixed upon each others’ faces. My appreciation for Cassatt’s rendering of their pacific repose is all the greater upon learning that the Prints & Photographs Division also holds the copper plate (above, right) used to imprint it upon paper in a printmaking technique known as drypoint.

Curator of Fine Prints, Katherine Blood describes the intaglio (from the Italian intagliare, “to incise”) technique drypoint:

“As the artist draws and scratches the design into the plate using a sharp needle or stylus, sometimes tipped with diamond or ruby,* a ridge of displaced metal, called the burr, rises along the edges of the incised lines. These ruffled edges catch some of the ink during the printing process to create soft, mossy lines. Over the course of printing a group or edition of prints from the drypoint plate, the burr gradually flattens so that the earliest impressions are the most nuanced and delicate. Once an edition is complete, the plate can be canceled as seen here by striking lines through the design.”

The two side-by-side details of the print and the plate below provide visual evidence to the “soft, mossy” lines and shading possible with the drypoint technique. Cassatt has executed drypoint masterfully in her portrayal of this intimate interaction between mother and daughter. The artist’s accomplishment strikes me as all the more astounding when I consider this technique, reduced to its essence, involves scratching with diamond-tipped steel upon copper, yet producing an image so tender and evocative.

Learn More:

• View digital scans of prints by artist Mary Cassatt in the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog. Roughly half of the 38 currently available are portrayals of a mother and child.
• In “Opinionated Art”: A Window into the Fine Art Print Collections at the Library of Congress, Curator of Fine Prints, Katherine Blood with additional insights by Martha Kennedy, Curator of Popular & Applied Graphic Art, present a perspective on the Library’s holdings viewed through the lens of artists’ engagement with such themes as war, civil rights and human rights, health, the environment, and issues of gender and culture.
• Browse the Creator Index of the Fine Print Collection to see the range of predominantly American artists represented, with print artists from many other countries present to a lesser extent.

* According to Cassatt biographer Nancy Mowll Mathews, Cassatt used diamond-tipped needles for her drypoint method as early as 1890. See: Mathews, Nancy Mowll. Mary Cassatt : A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, p. 193.