Cassatt’sA Goodnight Hug is simple in composition. A woman with dark hair and in a dark dress holds a fair-haired child closely against her. The child’s small arm is wound around her neck. The closeness of their faces suggests a kiss as well as a hug.
The painting is a close-up view of a tender and intimate moment. The foreground is completely taken up by the pair’s heads and upper bodies. In the background there is only the barest suggestion of the back of a blue chair against pale green and white wallpaper.
Painter of Mothers and Children
Maternity was the theme for which Mary Cassatt would become famous. Later she produced many paintings of women and children in all manner of affectionate and intimate poses, most with clearly defined facial features.
Cassatt’s A Good Night Hug, painted in 1880, is a forerunner of her mother-and-child paintings. It is unique in that the faces are hidden. Many of Cassatt’s other subjects, her friends and members of her family, are easily identifiable.
Identity of the Woman in A Good Night Hug
The woman’s dark bun of hair in A Good Night Hug does resemble the hairstyle of Cassatt’s mother in another painting, Katherine Cassatt Reading to Her Grandchildren, also done in 1880. A biography of Mary Cassatt relates that in the summer of 1880, during an extended family visit, she sketched and painted her nieces and nephews.
Perhaps it was during this visit when, glimpsing a tender interlude between one of the other women and one of the children in the family, Cassatt snatched her pastels and captured the moment for all time on the first drawing surface that came to hand – a piece of brown paper.
However, the identity of the woman and child in A Good Night Hug is not important, because the painting is not about the individuals in it but about the embrace that binds them together.
Impressionist Influence
According to biographer Nancy Mowll Matthews, one of Cassatt’s goals was to imbue her subjects with a resonant inner life, which she depicted as melancholy, yearning, or contemplation. In the art of the Impressionists, particularly that of Degas, she found a way of portraying her subjects with a “modern” psychological depth rather than worn-out romanticism.
Unlike Judith Slaying Holofernes and Marie Antoinette and Her Children, both painstakingly executed works that portray specific events and specific people, Mary Cassatt’s A Good Night Hug is accomplished in true Impressionist fashion, depicting with swift, unblended strokes a fleeting moment that is also timeless and universal.
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