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The Boating Party

This picture was painted MARY CASSATT in the bright sunlight of the Medi terranean at Antibes, on the French Riviera. Its subject, a vari ation on the artist’s favourite theme of motherhood, is the boatinj
excursion of a woman and her little boy. As the boat drifts from ashore, the hired rower gently pulls on the oars and the mother sits a little tensely, trying to restrain the wriggling child.
The artist shows less interest in the sentiment, however, than in the design of the painting. Like Whistler she minimizes the roundness of forms, treats them more like flat shapes. It is the man’s silhouette that she emphasizes, the crisp outline of the mother and child, and the swelling profile of the boat, repeated in the curved edge of the sail. Like Whistler again, she follows Japanese influence in composing the scene as if viewed from above. But her choice of colours is very different from that of her older contemporary. She uses the bright hues that her friends the impressionists had introduced. The dominating blues of the sea and of the boatman’s clothes contrast strikingly with the yellow-green boat and the mauve and pink dresses. The colours seem all the more vivid because shadows do not dull them and because strong lines separate one colour from another.
(Margaret Bouton. American Painting in the National Gallery of Art)