The American portrait and figure artist Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) is best known for imagery drawn from the private sphere of women—sedate moments in the daily lives of privileged individuals as they read, take tea, attend the opera, or care for their young children. But she was also one of the most inventive practitioners of Impressionism in many media, and not least in pastel, a newly popular medium in the late 19th century. In Mother and Child (1914), currently on view at The Met in gallery 769, we can see that her goal was not only to render a particular type of subject matter, but also to experiment with avant-garde techniques. As a professional artist, Cassatt was first introduced to pastel on the cusp of its rebirth in the 1870s. Largely disparaged as a serious medium for almost a century, and relegated to small academic color studies and studies for personal use, pastel regained popularity in the late nineteenth century among the Independents, the predecessors of the Impressionists, whom Cassatt joined at the invitation of Edgar Degas in 1877. Cassatt excelled in her handling of these simple sticks of powdered color, as exemplified in Mother and Child, a theme she specialized in after 1900. For Cassatt, the medium's modernist appeal rested on several aesthetic factors closely tied to its material properties. Among these properties were speed of execution, a vast array of ready-made colors, and ready adaptability to draftsmanly and broad painterly handling. As a dry medium, pastel was an ideal means to express the Impressionists' new emphasis on spontaneity; as an opaque medium, its distinctive reflectance responded to the era's fascination with the scintillating effects of natural light. The unvarnished matte surface of these works also implied a truthfulness or directness that was in opposition to the fiercely rigid academic establishment. As a modernist, Cassatt was attracted to pastel as a vehicle for new ideas on color, light, and spontaneity. Her forceful colorism exemplified the theories of Michel Eugene Chevreul and Ogden Rood, which formed the chromatic basis of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Their primary message was that when hues opposite each other on the color wheel are layered or placed adjacent to one another, they are intensified in richness. This orchestration of complementary colors is unmistakable in Mother and Child in the clashing of the luminous pink flesh tones, the violet dress, and the vibrant green background, as well as in the blue undertones of the skin. The latter—so evocative of the Italian Primitives, who were active from the late thirteenth to the fifteenth century and revered by the Impressionists—was an effect the press had criticized in Cassatt's work many years before as looking "dirty" and in need of washing. Cassatt's boldness in her later years in continuing to embrace a new visual language to depict modern life is expressed in the daring of her execution: the summary yet precise charcoal underdrawing visible through the colored layers, as well as in the spontaneity conveyed by her radical draftsmanly mode of applying broken, unblended, and overlapping strokes. ...But the most modernist feature of the Havemeyer composition is Cassatt's experimentation with imparting luminosity. The Impressionists were committed to increasing the effect of light in their work, and pastel's appeal lay in its special optical qualities: both the scattered light reflected from its innumerable particles at a micro level, and the light reflected from the irregular surface of the composition itself. The uneven amount of pastel deposited with each stroke produces a textural roughness that amplifies light. This impasto-like quality, which was antithetical to the varnished surfaces of Salon art, evoked the primitivism of fresco, gouache, and tempera that was greatly admired by the avant-garde artists of the day. Cassatt capitalized on this distinctive property of pastel in Mother and Child not only in her dense and irregular application of the medium, but also in her daring manipulation of the powdery texture in the flesh tones of the two figures and in the immediately surrounding green background. Unlike the direct flat strokes that she used for the hair and dress, the pastel here appears grainy when viewed in oblique or "raking" light. This unusual texture does not, however, result from a conventional dry application of the medium or from sticks of pastel dipped in water; instead, it is an effect she achieved by experimenting with steam.... Like Degas, Cassatt selectively exposed Mother and Child to moisture vapor. But unlike him, she then seems to have sifted crushed pastel onto the treated surface, so that its slight dampness agglomerated the particles into minute clusters as it dried... [Article ocntinues at https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/collection-insights/2018/mary-cassatt-modernist-mother-child]