She called the first one an imitation

The catalogue of her 1891 exhibition described the first print in the series as Essai d'imitation de l'estampe japonaise — an attempt at imitating the Japanese print. That is her own label, on her own work, in the room where she showed it. The other nine carried no such note.

Read the ten in order and you are reading somebody stop borrowing. It is unusual to have a series that says so plainly where it begins.

What she saw in April

From 25 April to 22 May 1890, the École des Beaux-Arts on the Quai Malaquais hung 725 Japanese prints. The catalogue was prefaced by Siegfried Bing, the dealer behind Le Japon artistique; the organising committee included Clemenceau and Edmond de Goncourt; the sheets came out of private French collections. Harunobu, Kiyonaga, Utamaro, Sharaku, Hokusai, Hiroshige. Five francs to get in on the first day, one franc after that, the takings to the Alliance Française.

Cassatt went, and wrote to Berthe Morisot to make sure she went too. You who want to make colour prints, she told her, you couldn't dream of anything more beautiful. I dream of it and don't think of anything else but colour on copper.

Her first biographer, writing in 1913 with her sitting there answering questions, put it in four words: the exhibition fut pour elle une révélation.

Colour on copper

Then she went home and spent a year learning how to do it.

Not woodblock. She had no interest in copying the method. She took the European intaglio tools she already had, drypoint and aquatint and softground, and made them produce the thing she had seen: flat colour, hard outline, a room, a woman doing something ordinary and not looking up. Two plates for some of them, three for others, never more.

She printed them herself, at the press, alongside a professional printer. The colour was not stencilled on afterwards; it was painted onto the plate, area by area, before each pull. Which means no two sheets in the edition are the same. On the Art Institute's Afternoon Tea Party she went further and added brushwork and gold on top of the printed sheet.

The whole thing was done, in her biographer's phrase, dans une sorte de hâte fiévreuse — in a kind of feverish haste, with equipment assembled in a hurry.

An adjective

She had been showing with the printmakers for years. In 1890 they constituted themselves, under Henri Guérard, as the Société des peintres-graveurs français.

There is no statute anybody can produce, no clause written against her. There is a word. Cette dénomination excluait Miss Mary Cassatt — the name itself excluded her. She was American and that was the end of it.

She was badly hurt, and then she went to Durand-Ruel and got a room. Thirteen prints, hung at the same time as the society's own exhibition was running in the main gallery. Pissarro, also foreign, also excluded, got a room too.

The public came, and in numbers, enough that her biographer says they proved her right. Her colleagues took it differently. At a dinner at the sculptor Bartholomé's the night after the opening, they teased her so unpleasantly that she left almost in tears.

The sentence Degas actually said

There is a line of Degas that gets quoted whenever these prints come up: that he could not admit a woman could draw as well as that. It is real. It appears in the 1913 biography, in a footnote attached to a passage about her earliest paintings. Not about the prints. The National Gallery's own catalogue for its Degas and Cassatt exhibition does not use it once.

What he said in front of one of these ten is on record too, and it is better. Standing before Woman Bathing — the woman bent over the basin, her back turned, drawn in a single line — he asked her:

Ce dos, vous l'avez modelé ?

That back, did you model it? It is a sculptor's question, and there is no shadow in the print at all. The back turns on the strength of the line.

He had one more comment. She had wanted the printer credited by name in the catalogue, out of what her biographer calls a scruple of delicacy. Degas said: Pourquoi cet homme ? Why this man.

She put him on the sheets anyway. In pencil, under the plate, in her own hand: Imprimée par l'artiste et M. Leroy — Mary Cassatt — (25 épreuves). Printed by the artist and M. Leroy. The Japanese sheets she had studied carried the printer's name beside the artist's; it appears she took that too.

Twenty-five, or ten

The pencil says twenty-five impressions. Her 1913 biographer says the series was printed in ten. We have gone with her handwriting, which is on the object and contemporary with it, over a number recalled twenty-two years later, but the discrepancy is there and we would rather say so.

By 1913 he called the set à peu près introuvable, almost impossible to find, and counted three complete series left: hers, her dealer's, and Vollard's.

The Art Institute of Chicago has all ten, accessioned together in one run, 1932.1281 to 1932.1290, out of the Ryerson collection. That is what we have printed from.

What is in them

A woman washing at a basin. A woman reading a letter and licking the envelope. Two women taking tea. A fitting, in front of a mirror. A tram, with a nurse and a baby and the Seine going by outside. A mother kissing a child. A woman doing her hair with her back to us.

Nobody in these ten sheets is performing for anyone outside the picture. That is not sentiment; it is a decision about where the viewer stands, made ten times in a row, in the year she taught herself a new medium in order to make it.

The ten

The Bath Breeskin 143 The Lamp Breeskin 144 In the Omnibus Breeskin 145 The Letter Breeskin 146 The Fitting Breeskin 147 Woman Bathing Breeskin 148 Mother's Kiss Breeskin 149 Maternal Caress Breeskin 150 Afternoon Tea Party Breeskin 151 The Coiffure Breeskin 152

In the order of the catalogue raisonné, Breeskin 143 to 152 — a consecutive block with no gaps, which is the best evidence that these ten are the set. All from the Art Institute of Chicago, accessioned together as 1932.1281–1290.