Kady JLKR

Video documentation produced by the Amon Carter Museum of Art, Fort Worth, Texas.

In the 1970s, Janet Ruttenberg participated in a collaboration that brought new insight into Mary Cassatt’s printmaking techniques. Working with printmaker and theorist Sue Fuller and master printer Donn Steward, the group set out to recreate the refined tonal effects found in Cassatt’s 1881 color prints.

Fuller had long believed that Cassatt employed an innovative soft ground technique in La Coiffure and In the Omnibus. But with no surviving documentation and the original plates lost, her theory remained unproven. To investigate, Ruttenberg pressed textured paper into a soft ground before etching the copper plate in an acid bath. In Cassatt’s time, artists typically used aquatint to create tonal variation, but this method — using the texture of the paper to lift areas of the ground — produced a collage-like surface with rich tonal depth.

While it remains uncertain whether Cassatt invented this approach, the results of Fuller, Ruttenberg, and Steward’s experiments closely mirrored the originals. Their findings lent significant support to Fuller’s theory, later acknowledged in Adelyn Breeskin’s 1979 Cassatt Catalogue Raisonné. The project also helped expand recognition of women’s contributions to technical innovation in printmaking.

Ruttenberg’s In the Omnibus, after Mary Cassatt and The Coiffure, after Mary Cassatt are held in the prints collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.