Harvard's Cassatt Sale, Revisited

Back in November, Tyler Green broke the news that the Harvard University Art Museums had placed a Mary Cassatt at Christie's, where it ended up selling for just over $4 million. At the time, Theodore Stebbins, curator of American Art, told us that the money made by selling the painting, ''Mother and Two Children," was likely to be used to buy a work by the same artist.

That's just what happened in March, when the HUAM acquired what it called "an important set" of color etchings - one final impression and seven proofs of Cassatt's "The Bath." A spokesman said the museum wouldn't disclose how much it paid a New York dealer for the works. We're waiting for Harvard to send along an image. The version below is from the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.

Here's more, from a release sent along after we asked:

"The prints are some of the finest examples of Cassatt's lifelong printmaking enterprise, for they established her interest in and commitment to color etching.

Cassatt's first efforts to print in color were a series of ten color etching and aquatints that appeared in her first solo exhibition at the gallery Durand-Ruel in Paris. In this series, Cassatt wanted to replicate the practice and appearance of Japanese woodblock prints produced from multiple blocks, but she wanted to use copperplates instead. "The Bath," sometimes called "The Tub," is the first print from that series and simply depicts a woman and a naked baby beside a bathtub. The proofs well demonstrate the experimental nature of Cassatt's printmaking practice--she prints on different color papers and variously leaves ink on the plate to create varying atmospheric areas of tone. The set reveals the ingenuity and diligence necessary to create the final version of the image."