The Letter (Full)

About this work

Artist

Mary Cassatt (1844–1926)

Year

1890-1891

Medium

Drypoint, soft-ground etching and aquatint, printed in colour

Original size

36.6 × 22.6 cm

Collection

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Movement

Impressionism

Series

The Ten (colour prints, 1890–1891)

A woman in a patterned dress sits at a writing desk and seals an envelope at her lips, the flowered wallpaper behind her pressed flat against the figure. The Letter is one of the set of ten colour prints Cassatt made in 1890–91 after seeing the great exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the spring of 1890. She worked out a demanding technique of drypoint, soft-ground etching and aquatint, printing each sheet from several plates in succession to build up areas of flat colour and pattern, and the set was shown at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris in 1891 in an edition of twenty-five. The prints did not sell well at the time but are now among the most admired colour prints of the nineteenth century. This impression, the final state, belongs to the Rosenwald Collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

This print reproduces the whole work, uncropped, from a high-resolution scan of the original. The original is in the public domain.