Most of what we make begins with someone looking. In our case it was a child, a children's book of paintings, and one image he would not move past — a mother bent over a basin, a small foot held in her hand.
The painting is The Child's Bath, made by Mary Cassatt in 1893. There is no event in it. No occasion. A woman is washing a child's feet, and both of them are looking down at the water. That is the whole picture. And yet you cannot stop looking, because the painting is entirely made of attention — hers for the child, ours for them both.
A subject called minor
Cassatt spent the better part of forty years painting mothers and children. In her time, critics called the subject domestic, sentimental, minor — the kind of thing a woman painter would do. She kept doing it anyway, with a seriousness usually reserved for history and war. She understood something the critics did not: that paying attention to an ordinary moment, fully and without performance, is one of the most demanding and generous things a person can do.
She refused to call it minor. So do we.
When we began building Yours, we went looking for company, and found it. Berthe Morisot, painting her sister with a newborn. Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, painting herself holding her daughter. Painters — many of them women — who chose this subject not because it was assigned to them, but because they saw what was in it.
Why it matters to a keepsake
When a mother sits down to write in Yours, she is not staring at a blank page alone. Beside each opening is a painting that has held the same gesture for a century or more. The work says, quietly: this has always mattered. Others have paid attention this way. You are in their lineage now.
That is why we went back to Cassatt. Not for decoration. For permission — the same permission she gave herself, to treat an ordinary afternoon as something worth keeping.