Afternoon Tea Party

Mary Cassatt

National Gallery of Art

Two women sit next to a table holding a tray with tea cups and saucers in this faintly colored, vertical drypoint and aquatint. Faint black lines outline the women, their features, clothing, and objects in the room, and each area is filled in with a flat, very pale color. The women face each other and take up most of the composition. The women’s skin is the color of the cream-white paper, and both have oval faces, rounded noses, and their hair is pulled up and back. The woman to our right has brown hair and leans forward as she holds up a barely gray plate with her right hand, closer to us. The other hand rests on the arm of her tan-brown chair. Her dress has a bodice and long skirt the color of the paper with smoke-gray, long sleeves and fabric covering her chest and tucked into the low, rounded neckline. The other woman wears a cap over black hair. Also the color of the paper, the hat has the hint of celery-green feather and is tied in a bow under the chin. She wears a hip-length, nickel gray cloak over a pale, sage-green dress. She looks down at the plate and holds what might be a cookie or biscuit with one hand and a cup and a dish-like saucer with the other. Her lips are downturned and her head pulled slightly back to create a double chin. She sits upright in another brown chair. In the lower right corner of the sheet, the round gray table is barely bigger than the round gray tray it holds. On it are two more cups and saucers and a jug, presumably holding milk. What might be another cup-and-saucer set or the teapot is cut off by the right edge of the paper. An ice-white screen with openings across the top stands to the left behind the second woman, and a window is behind the first. Lemon-lime green, spiky fronds of a houseplant angle up across curtains tinged pink. A blush-pink curtain is pulled to the left side, and squiggles and flowers printed in rose pink suggest patterns on all the curtains. The artist's initials are written in graphite under the lower left corner of the printed image, “MC.”