Mother Jeanne Nursing Her Baby 1908

Mary Cassatt made this pastel drawing called "Mother Jeanne Nursing Her Baby", sometime in her career. I can almost feel Cassatt moving the pastel stick across the paper – a dance of pinks, blues, and browns, capturing this tender moment between mother and child. Look at how the colors blend and bleed into each other; the strokes aren't trying to capture a photographic likeness, but something more felt. You know, the thing that gives it its emotional punch? I imagine Cassatt, charcoal dust on her fingers, stepping back, squinting, layering one color over another, trying to get it just right. Trying to capture the soft weight of the baby in the mother’s arms, the look of total contentment on both their faces. It reminds me of other artists like Berthe Morisot, who were also grappling with how to represent domestic life, everyday life, through painting. It's like they were all in conversation with each other, figuring out what it meant to be a woman, to be an artist, to be alive at that particular moment in time. And isn’t that what art’s all about?