The Boating Party

Mary Cassatt, the American painter lionized among Degas and the Impressionists in Paris, made The Boating Party at Antibes in the south of France. It shows a man in a sailing boat holding an oar beside a woman and child, the figures given a bold simplicity and a flatness of form that set the picture apart from her usual, softer domestic scenes. The composition owes a clear debt to Japanese woodblock prints — the cut-off forms, the tilted boat, and the strong pattern of the dark awning — and to the example of Edgar Degas, whose loose figure style she absorbed. Praised as one of the greatest American paintings of its era, it demonstrated the audacity that its punctual, genteel maker rarely displayed.