Before the colour

In one impression of The Fitting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, only the heads and the upper bodies are drawn. The dresses are not there yet.¹ In the finished print a woman stands for a fitting, a seamstress kneels at her feet, and a mirror shows the standing woman a second time. Nobody looks at anybody. What ties the three figures together is the dress: its mauve stripes run down the skirt, repeat in the mirror, and come back darker on the seamstress.² In the drypoint that dress does not exist. A state proof in Chicago, the fifth of seven, already has the stripes.³

Mary Cassatt made ten colour prints in less than a year, and for most of them something of the way there survives. That is where this book looks.

Spring 1890

From 25 April to 22 May 1890 the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris showed Japanese prints: 725 of them, by the numbering of the catalogue, from Harunobu and Utamaro to Hokusai and Hiroshige.⁴ Cassatt, who already collected Japanese prints, went, and wrote to Berthe Morisot to make sure she saw it: “You who want to make color prints you couldn’t dream of anything more beautiful. I dream of it and don’t think of anything else but color on copper.”⁵ Achille Segard, who wrote his book on her in 1913 from conversations with her, gave the visit one sentence: the exhibition “fut pour elle une révélation”, was a revelation to her.⁶

She made the ten with a printer working beside her. Of colour printing she said: “I was entirely ignorant of the method when I began.”⁷

Two or three plates

Each print is pulled from two or three copper plates, each inked in its own colours and printed in turn onto the same sheet.⁸ Cassatt began with a drawing on paper, laid over a plate coated with soft ground, a tacky mixture of wax, grease and resin. Tracing the lines with a pencil lifted the ground where she pressed, and acid bit those lines lightly into the copper. The transferred lines can still be seen on her drawings for The Letter, in Cleveland, and for In the Omnibus, in Washington.⁹ Over that faint guide she drew with a drypoint needle straight into the copper. The colour came as aquatint: a dust of resin fused to the plate, so that the acid bites around each grain and the plate holds ink as an even tone.¹⁰

Then the inking. She put several colours on a single plate, each dabbed onto its own area, à la poupée. Colours that touched on the same plate ran into each other a little, so she decided which could share one. In The Letter the leaves beside the blue dress share the dress’s plate and carry a trace of its blue; the pink of the blouse, which would have turned muddy there, went on another plate.¹¹ She made twenty-five impressions of each of the ten: two hundred and fifty sheets, each inked by hand.¹²

Three faces left white

The National Gallery of Art holds six works for In the Omnibus, from the first drawing to the colour proofs.¹³ The drawing has traces of two more passengers, a seated man in a top hat and a standing woman in profile; neither reached the print. In the proofs she tried peach, coral and teal, and a flesh tone on the three faces. In the end she left the faces the white of the paper, with a touch of colour on the lips.¹⁴ The white of those faces is a colour she tried and took out.

“Why this man?”

Each of the ten is signed twice. Under the image, in pencil, Cassatt wrote that it was imprimée par l’artiste et M. Leroy, printed by the artist and Mr Leroy. According to Segard, when she wanted his name in the catalogue as well, Degas asked: “Pourquoi cet homme ?” Why this man?¹⁵ Segard calls him a craftsman skilled in his art and never names him. His first name, often given as Modeste, we could not find in any source of the period.¹⁶

The book

Colour on copper shows the ten in the impressions of the Art Institute of Chicago, reproduced from the museum’s photographs with no adjustment of colour.¹⁷ Every print gets two spreads. The first is the whole sheet, with a short text on what to look for, facing a detail at full page. The second opens it further: the same print before its colour, the drawing behind it, or another impression from Washington, inked by hand in a different way. In the Omnibus is followed from the first drawing to the finished print, step by step. Her life comes at the end, once you know the work.

The photographs of these prints are free on the museums’ websites. What a museum page does not do is set the drypoint of The Fitting opposite the finished sheet and let you turn from one to the other. The book does that, print by print, for 68 pages.