Breakfast in Bed

Mary Stevenson Cassatt's "Breakfast in Bed" is one of her most famous portraits of a mother and child.

This Link was provided by the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino.

On Mother's Day, maybe you will treat your mother to breakfast in bed just like the mother in this painting. It was created by Mary Stevenson Cassatt, an American painter who lived in France and became famous for her beautiful paintings of mothers and their children.

Born in Pennsylvania in 1844, Cassatt attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. After that, she moved to Europe to further follow her dream of being an artist. She settled in Paris and became a student of Edgar Degas and a close friend of Camille Pissarro. Both of these men were Impressionist painters and Cassatt began painting in this style as well.

Impressionism is a school of painting that began in France. Impressionist painters use short brushstrokes of unmixed colors to capture the effects of lights. Some people think the paintings look "blurry." Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley are also famous Impressionist painters who worked between 1867 and 1886. Cassatt was one of the few women accepted into this tight group of artists.

Cassatt spent many years painting mothers and their children. "Breakfast in Bed" is one of her most famous pictures on this subject. It shows a mother and child on a bed. The mother holds and gazes adoringly at her small child while the child looks with curiosity into the world. It expresses a tension that often exists between parents and their children. The parent wants to hold onto and protect the child, while the child wants to break free and go off to explore.

For all her lovely paintings of mothers and children, Cassatt never became a mother herself. She decided early in life not to marry and raise a family so that she could concentrate on her work. Cassatt lived in France until she died in 1926.

You can see "Breakfast in Bed" in the Huntington's Scott Gallery as well as many other beautiful paintings. For museum information, call (626) 405-2141 or visit www.huntington.org.

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