Mother & Child: A Celebration of Boundless Love

Mother & Child: A Celebration of Boundless Love

Through inspiring poetry accompanied by the beautiful art of Mary Cassatt, this book celebrates the special relationship of boundless love and undying devotion that exists only between mothers and their children. The poems have been selected from the works of Christina Rossetti, John Greenleaf Whittier, Louisa Stuart Costello, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Ross Wallace, Rudyard Kipling, and many others. Each is accompanied by one of Mary Cassatt’s exquisite paintings portraying that extraordinary intimate mother–child relationship. Mary Cassatt was an American Impressionist famous for her works portraying mothers and their children. She was born in Pennsylvania in 1844 and moved to Paris in 1866 to study art. She came home to the U.S. for a brief period in 1870, but returned to Europe in 1871 to pursue her career. She settled in Paris in 1874 and lived much of her adult life in France. A few years later Edgar Degas invited her to show her works with the Impressionists. His work had a considerable influence on Cassatt. Cassatt’s popular reputation derives from a series of paintings and prints made later in her career, depicting the maternal relationship. Her earliest significant work in this theme is Gardner Held by His Mother (held in the New York Public Library print collection). After 1900, she concentrated almost exclusively on mother-and-child subjects.