Recap: Prints and Drawings From the Collection Of Ambroise Vollard, Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

Adelson Galleries"The Barefooted Child" (1896-1897), drypoint and aquatint, one of many works by Mary Cassatt on view at the Adelson Galleries.

According to the New York Times the last of three Cassatt exhibitions held at the gallery since 2000, this show focuses on a body of work that passed through the hands of the influential Parisian dealer Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939). Together, the drawings and prints here illuminate the working methods of the popular female Impressionist.

Vollard, the subject of a 2006-7 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, did not represent Mary Cassatt. (Her paintings were sold by his rival Paul Durand-Ruel.) In the early 20th century, however, he was able to acquire a large cache of her work on paper. This relationship enabled Cassatt (who was in her 60s) to wrest exclusive control of her legacy from Durand-Ruel, aligning herself with the more modern sensibility of the artists on Vollard’s roster.

The works at Adelson offer a rare opportunity to appreciate the technical experimentation behind Cassatt’s thematically restrained images of mothers, children and ladies of leisure. They include etchings, aquatints, preparatory pencil drawings and pastel counterproofs.

Soft-ground aquatints of women at the opera show Cassatt favoring painterly washes over technical precision. Viewers can compare several states of “Lady in Black, in a Loge, Facing Right” (1879-80) with a deftly shaded preparatory drawing. In the prints, an ancillary figure with opera glasses becomes an indistinct blob.

Several drypoints featuring charming, chubby-handed toddlers convey empathy and intimacy. They reveal that Cassatt often constructed an image around a child’s gesture: the exhausted slump of “Repose” or the inquisitive reach of “The Stocking” (both from around 1890).

After viewing an exhibition of Japanese ukiyo-e in 1890, Cassatt began to focus on color prints. In an early proof of “The Barefooted Child” (1896-97), she plays with arresting contrasts: a blue smock against a nectarine-orange background.

Vollard’s buy-in-bulk strategy is our gain, illuminating the complexity of process Cassatt brought to her limited purview.