The Letter
1890-1891 · Drypoint, soft-ground etching and aquatint, printed in colour · National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
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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 exhibition-poster edition shows the whole work beneath original typography set in-house. The original is in the public domain.
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About this design
The Madten promise
A fine-art print
The same artwork as a clean fine-art print — the image shown large with a minimal caption.
