Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Artist

Sources

A Taste of Europe. Born into a wealthy Pennsylvania family, Mary Stevenson Cassatt enlisted privilege in the service of artistic endeavor. She spent much of her adult life in France, where she was the only American artist who frequented the inner circles of the French Impressionists. The roots of Cassatt’s success may be traced to a childhood rich in culture and creature comforts. Pittsburgh in the mid nineteenth century boasted no more solid citizens than the investment banker Robert Simpson Cassatt and his wife, Katherine Johnston Cassatt. Born on 22 May 1844, Mary Cassatt was one of five children; she had just turned seven when the family embarked on a four-year visit to Europe. On their return the Cassatts settled in Philadelphia—then the second-largest city in America. At age sixteen Mary enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art; six years later, having exhausted the academy’s offerings, she ventured to Paris in the company of her friend and fellow art student Eliza Haldeman. As the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts was closed to women, Cassatt was forced to pursue her studies in private lessons and in the artist colonies sprinkled across the French countryside.

The Young Artist. “Americans have a way of thinking work is nothing,” Cassatt observed near the end of her career. “Come out and play they say.” Blessed with money and leisure, Cassatt chose work over play. Having returned home in 1870, Cassatt moved with her family from Philadelphia to Altoona, Pennsylvania, where she struggled to maintain her artistic momentum away from the centers of cultural influence. New York galleries failed to sell her paintings, and a substantial collection of her early work, on display in a Chicago gallery, burned up in the Great Fire of 1871. That December twenty-seven-year-old Cassatt sailed again for Europe—and embarked on a period marked by both productivity and periodic self-doubt. In Italy, Spain, and France Cassatt acquired artistic technique by studying the old masters and mingling with the new. She developed a particular talent for painting women, both in portraits and the more informal “pictures” that she considered a higher form of art. In 1874 Ida, Cassatt’s painting of a red-haired woman, so impressed Edgar Degas that he declared its unknown artist to be “someone who feels as I do.” Although Ida had gained a spot in that year’s Paris Salon—the “official” annual exhibition of fine art—Cassatt remained at odds with the art establishment, criticized for her “sloppy” brushwork and rambunctious use of color. Not until 1877, when Degas invited her to exhibit with the “Independents” (later known as the Impressionists), did Cassatt find a true home abroad.

Among the Impressionists. Impressionism liberated Cassatt from artistic convention. In early paintings Cassatt had strained for “mood” by draping sitters in exotic costumes or placing subjects in romantic settings. Now, however, Cassatt began to uncover “atmosphere” in the commonplace and to achieve fresh effects with experimental brush and colorwork rather than artificial composition. Cassatt’s parents and sister joined her overseas in 1877; her brother and his children visited often. Increasingly, Cassatt employed her relatives as models. Works such as The Cup ofTea or Mrs. Cassatt Reading to Her Grandchildren, both exhibited at the 1881 Impres-sionist show, stand as representative glimpses into the Cassatt family circle. Cassatt’s many mother-and-child compositions of the 1880s and 1890s—among them, Gardner Held by His Mother (1888), Mother’s Goodnight Kiss (1888), At the Window (1889), Helene de Septeuil (1889), Baby on His Mother’s Arm, Sucking His Finger (1889), Mother and Child (1890), and The Bath (1890-1891)—depict a full range of domestic activity. Settled in Paris, surrounded by friends and family, Cassatt could half-jokingly describe her own domestic routine as “housekeeping, painting & oyster frying.” Whatever her merits as housekeeper or cook, by the 1890s Cassatt’s artistic talents had earned her the regard of her adopted land. “Mary is at work again, intent on fame & money she says, & counts on her fellow country men now that she has made a reputation here,” Cassatt’s mother commented in 1891. The following year Cassatt finally received a summons from the American art establishment.

A Modern Woman. In 1892 the organizers of the upcoming World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago commissioned Cassatt to paint a murai for the Woman’s Building. Cassatt addressed her subject, Modem Woman, in three allegorical panels: “Young Girls Pursuing Fame,” “Arts, Music, Dancing,” and the centerpiece, “Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge or Science.” The mural was abstract, symbolic, and, Cassatt hoped, “as bright, as gay, as amusing as possible.” When a friend protested that Cassatt had depicted “woman apart from her relations to man,” Cassatt countered that men were to be “painted in ali their vigour on the walls of the other buildings.” In her corner of the Woman’s Building, the artist hoped to capture “the sweetness of childhood, the charm of womanhood.” As she declared, “if I have not conveyed some sense of that charm, in one word if I have not been absolutely feminine, then I have failed.” Like so many of the other artistic fancies on display in Chicago, Cassatt’s murai was dismantled at the dose of the fair in 1893 and subsequently lost.

Final Years. To the end Cassatt continued to paint women at work, at home, and at play. An advocate of women’s rights, she held women responsible for their own advancement. “American women have been spoiled, treated and indulged like children,” she observed late in life; “they must wake up to their duties.” By 1915 eye trouble forced Cassatt to give painting. She remained a fixture of American expatriate society for another decade, dying at her country home outside Paris on 14 June 1926.

Sources

Nancy Hale, Mary Cassatt (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975);

Nancy Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt (New York: Abrams, 1987);

Mathews, ed., Cassatt and Her Circle: Selected Letters (New York: Ab-beville Press, 1984).

Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt (1845-1926), an American painter, is considered a member of the French impressionist group. Best known for her series of paintings of a mother and child, she also portrayed fashionable society.

Mary Cassatt was born in Pittsburgh, Pa., on May 23, 1845. As a child, she lived for a time in France. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In 1866 she began her travels in Italy, Spain, and Holland, finally settling in Paris. There she exhibited at the Salon and met Edgar Degas, who was her real teacher, as she was his only pupil.

Despite her success at the Salon, Cassatt's sympathies lay with the impressionists, and in 1877 at Degas's suggestion she joined the group and exhibited with them in 1879. Her work sold well, particularly in Philadelphia, and she in turn bought paintings by the French impressionists. She also helped American friends, such as the Havemeyers, form their collections of impressionist paintings. Cassatt remained strongly American in her sentiments, as many expatriates do, and she wrote the American painter J. Alden Weir that "at some future time I shall see New York the artists' ground."

Cassatt's brother, Alexander, brought his family to Paris in 1880, the first of many trips. Although she never married, she was enchanted by her nieces and nephews and excelled in painting children, who dominate her subject matter. Her early work, done with the impressionists, is probably her best, but she remains known as the painter and poet of the nursery.

The paintings of Mary Cassatt, filled with light and joy, give a false impression of this strong-minded and somewhat difficult woman. She was at her best in her relations with other artists, for only in this environment did she consider herself among her intellectual equals. In later life she suffered from ill health and failing eyesight and was totally blind at her death. She died in her château at Mesnil-Beaufresne on June 14, 1926.

Painting Style

Midway in her career Cassatt ceased to be an impressionist painter. Her early works have the delicacy, the atmospheric effects, the play of light and shadow associated with the style, but she never used broken color and her use of complementary colors was slight. Paintings like La Lo are indeed impressionist pictures and have the characteristic instantaneous effect of being caught out of the corner of the eye. But her paintings of mothers and children are fully realized and three-dimensional; the drawing is classical and complete; and the color, far from being light and separated into its component parts, is flat and sometimes rather acid, like the Japanese prints which influenced her so much. These careful figure studies, completely rendered, in no way reflect the infinite variety of nature or the passing world, as the paintings of the impressionists did; they exist entirely in the hothouse atmosphere of the nursery, with no sound except the little cries.

Further Reading

The only thorough treatment of Mary Cassatt's life is Frederick A. Sweet's excellent Miss Mary Cassatt, Impressionist from Pennsylvania (1966). Sweet had access to family letters and papers that provide the basis for a new understanding of her character. Other biographies include Forbes Watson, Mary Cassatt (1932), and Julia M. H. Carson, Mary Cassatt (1966). For general background see John Rewald, The History of Impressionism (1946; rev. ed. 1961). □

Cassatt, Mary (1844–1926), artist and member of the Impressionist movement.Born into an upper‐class Pennsylvania family, Cassatt as a child spent four years in France and Germany. She enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at age sixteen but was determined to seek training abroad. She traveled to Europe with her mother in 1865 and, except for a brief return to the United States in 1870–1871 and several short trips home, remained there for the rest of her life, moving permanently to Paris in 1874. Cassatt studied with the conservative artists Jean‐Léon Gérôme and Charles Chaplin but became dissatisfied with submitting her work for exhibition to the Paris Salon, perceiving that its juries were prejudiced against women artists. She accepted Edgar Degas's invitation to join the Impressionists in 1877 and first exhibited with them in 1879.

Cassatt belonged to a cultured intellectual circle in Paris, although her gender and class prevented her from close interaction with her contemporaries in the cafés of Paris, the symbol of modern life for some impressionist artists. Her first painting of a mother and child, in 1888, announced a theme with which she became increasingly identified. Cassatt continued to paint until 1915, when poor eyesight forced her to stop. Cassatt also served as art adviser to her friends Louisine and Henry O. Havemeyer, whose collection of Impressionist and old master paintings was eventually donated to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
See also Painting: To 1945.

Bibliography

Nancy Mowll Mathews , Mary Cassatt: A Life, 1994.
Judith Barter et al. , Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman, 1998.

Bailey Van Hook

Cassatt, Mary (b Allegheny [now part of Pittsburgh], 22 May, 1844; d Château de Beaufresne, Le Mesnil-Théribus, Oise, 14 June 1926). American painter and printmaker active mainly in France, where she enjoyed a highly successful career (she came from a prosperous family but she also made a good deal of money from her work). She settled in Paris in 1874 (following earlier studies there) and became friendly particularly with Degas. He invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists and she took part in four of their eight group shows (1879, 1880, 1881, 1886). Cassatt specialized in everyday life scenes, her favourite theme being a mother with her child or children (although she never married). In the 1880s her work was thoroughly Impressionist in style, but from about 1890 her forms became more solid and firmly outlined; comparing her with Berthe Morisot, the other leading woman Impressionist, Gauguin said, ‘Miss Cassatt has as much charm but more strength.’ She was an outstanding pastellist and printmaker, her finest prints being in colour and in a combination of techniques (aquatint, drypoint, etching). Their bold flattened forms and unconventional viewpoints were influenced by an exhibition of Japanese prints she saw in Paris in 1890. Cassatt's eyesight began to fail when she was in her fifties and she had virtually stopped working by 1914; following an unsuccessful operation for cataracts in 1921 she was almost blind. In her later years she encouraged her wealthy American friends to buy Impressionist works and in this way exercised an important influence on American taste.

Cassatt, Mary (1844–1926). American painter and printmaker active mainly in France. She settled in Paris in 1874 (following earlier studies there) and became friendly particularly with Degas. He invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists and she took part in four of their eight group shows (1879, 1880, 1881, 1886). Cassatt specialized in everyday life scenes, her favourite theme being a mother with her child or children. In the 1880s her work was thoroughly Impressionist in style, but from about 1890 her forms became more solid and firmly outlined. She was an outstanding pastellist and printmaker, her finest prints being in colour and in a combination of techniques (aquatint, drypoint, etching). Their bold flattened forms and unconventional viewpoints were influenced by an exhibition of Japanese prints she saw in Paris in 1890. Cassatt's eyesight began to fail when she was in her fifties and she had virtually stopped working by 1914. She came from a wealthy family and had an important influence on American taste by urging her rich friends to buy Impressionist works.

Cassatt, Mary (1844–1926). American painter and printmaker who worked mainly in Paris in the circle of the Impressionists (she was a friend particularly of Degas). She specialized in everyday life scenes, her favourite theme being a mother with her child or children. Her early paintings were thoroughly Impressionist in style, but from about 1890 her forms became more solid and firmly outlined. She was an outstanding pastellist and printmaker, her finest prints being in colour and in a combination of techniques (aquatint, dry-point, etching). Their bold flattened forms and unconventional viewpoints were influenced by an exhibition of Japanese prints she saw in Paris in 1890. Cassatt's eyesight began to fail when she was in her fifties and she had virtually stopped working by 1914. She came from a wealthy family and had an important influence on American taste by urging her rich friends to buy Impressionist works.

Cassatt, Mary (1845–1926) French painter and printmaker, b. USA. She was influenced by Degas and impressionism. Her finest paintings include The Bath (1892). She also made many fine drypoint and aquatint studies of domestic life.