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Mary Cassatt — Selected Paintings

Shown from the waist up, a young girl wearing a slate-gray dress and straw hat stands with her hands clasped in front of her in this vertical portrait painting. The girl has light, peachy skin, and her cheeks are lightly flushed. Her body faces us but she tips her head slightly to her right, our left, and looks off into the distance with dark brown eyes. Her faint eyebrows drawn together, and her cherry-red, full lips slightly turn down at the corners. She has a button nose and a rounded chin line. She has dark blond, straight, shoulder-length hair under a wide, flat-brimmed straw hat. The hat is wrapped around the crown with a checkered white and black bow. Her shoulders slope down as she holds one wrist with the other hand down in front of her. She wears a jumper over a shirt with short white sleeves. At first glance the jumper appears pale gray but closer inspection reveals strokes of pale lilac, ivory white, and cobalt blue. The girl’s features and clothing are painted with loose, visible brushstrokes, and the background behind her is painted with vertical strokes of tan blended with faint green. Short dabs of brighter gold and butter yellow give the impression of sunshine on the brim of the hat and in the girl’s hair. The artist signed the work with loose letters in the lower right corner, “Mary Cassatt.”

Overview

Mary Cassatt was born into an affluent family in Pennsylvania on May 22, 1844. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, one of the country's leading art schools. In addition to having regular exhibitions of European and American art, the faculty at the Academy encouraged students to study abroad. In 1865 Cassatt approached her parents with the idea of studying in Paris. Despite their initial objections, Cassatt's parents relented and allowed her to go.

In Paris, Cassatt attended classes in the studios of the academic artists Jean Léon Gérôme and Thomas Couture. She also traveled extensively in Europe studying and copying old master paintings. In 1874 she settled permanently in Paris, where her work was regularly shown at the Salon, the annual government-sponsored exhibition. The following year she saw the pastel work of Edgar Degas, one of the leaders of the Impressionist movement, in a gallery window. Years later, Cassatt described the importance of this experience, "I used to go and flatten my nose against the window and absorb all I could of his art. It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it."

Cassatt was one of a relatively small number of American women to become professional artists in the nineteenth century when most women, particularly wealthy ones, did not pursue a career. Her decision to study abroad reflects the strong character she displayed throughout her career. When Cassatt settled in Paris, an artistic revolution was already underway in France. Changes were occurring in the way that artists showed their work to the public, and in the freedom artists had to choose their own subjects and styles. Cassatt's career developed against the backdrop of these changes.

Child in a Straw Hat, c. 1886, oil on canvas, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1983.1.17

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A small brown dog and a pale-skinned little girl wearing a white dress sit in matching celestial-blue armchairs in this horizontal painting. To our right, the girl sits with her legs angled to our left. She slumps back with her legs spread, and her left elbow, on our right, is bent so that hand rests behind her head. Her other elbow is draped over the armrest. Her dark brown hair appears to be pulled back, and tawny brown eyes under faint brows gaze down and to our left. She has a small nose set in a round face and a coral-pink mouth closed in a straight line. Her white dress has touches of gray, soft pink, and powder blue with a wide plaid sash around her waist. The pine-green, black, and sapphire-blue sash is accented with overlapping vertical and horizontal lines of burnt orange, light blue, and mustard yellow. Her socks match her sash and come up to mid-calf, over black shoes with silver buckles. The small dog has scruffy black fur and a russet-brown face. It lies curled in the chair opposite the girl, to our left, with its eyes closed and ears pricked up. The rounded backs of the upholstered chairs curve down to become the low arms. The vivid and light blue fabric of the chairs is scattered with loosely painted strokes of avocado and forest green, peach pink, cherry red, plum purple, and white. Beyond the chairs closest to us is another armchair and an armless loveseat, both covered with the same fabric. They sit at the back of the room, in a corner flooded with silvery light coming through four windows on the right side. The furniture is arranged on a peanut-brown floor. The artist signed in the lower left, “Mary Cassatt.”

In Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, Mary Cassatt demonstrates her powers of observation in showing her young subject sprawled in a large, blue armchair. The smartly dressed little girl fidgets; in the next chair is her sleeping dog. The girl's pose has the naturalism of childhood that would later characterize many of Cassatt's paintings of children.

Pictorial structure and clarity are the foundation of Cassatt's art. Under Edgar Degas' tutelage, she began to collect and study Japanese prints; their patterns and asymmetric designs greatly influenced her work. Here she placed the girl, the focus of the composition, off-center. The armchairs form a pattern encircling an oddly shaped patch of gray floor in the middle of the picture. As in Japanese art, the forms are tilted up, and the edge of the canvas crops the image.

Cassatt's strong colors and energetic brushwork mark her connection with the French impressionists. In style and subject matter, her art is close to that of Degas and Edouard Manet. Degas, in fact, made suggestions about the composition of this painting and reworked parts of its background.

In Cassatt's pictures, light does not dissolve form. Instead, objects retain their mass and coherence with light enhancing their physical presence.

Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878, oil on canvas, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1983.1.18

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This painting is the second of two portraits by Mary Cassatt thought to be of Mary Ellison. Cassatt painted the first in 1877, shortly after she met Miss Ellison through their mutual friend, Louise Waldron Elder (later Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, a well-known American art collector and a patron of Cassatt). Cassatt does not flatter but, rather, concentrates on Miss Ellison's contemplative mood.

In this painting, Cassatt demonstrates her affinities with the impressionists. Her brushwork is open and sketchy, and she favors a strong compositional structure over pictorial detail. The mirror behind Ellison was a device the artist used often; its presence allowed the expansion of the composition's implied space to include areas that the viewer could not otherwise see.

Miss Mary Ellison, c. 1880, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.95

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Shown from the knees up, two young women with pale, peachy skin wearing white gowns sit close together and almost fill this vertical painting. The women are angled to our left and look in that direction. The young woman on our right has a heart-shaped face, dark blond hair gathered at the back of her head, and light blue eyes. Her full, coral-pink lips are closed, the corners in greenish shadows. Her dress is off the shoulders, has a tightly fitted bodice, and the skirt pools around her lap. The fabric is painted in strokes of pale shell pink, faint blue, and light mint green but our eye reads it as a white dress. She wears a navy-blue ribbon as a choker and long, frosty-green gloves come nearly to her elbows. She holds a bouquet in her lap, made up of cream-white, butter-yellow, and pale pink flowers with grass-green leaves and one blood-red rose. Her companion sits just beyond her on our left and covers the lower part of her face with an open fan. The fan is painted in silvery white decorated with swipes of daffodil yellow, teal green, and coral red. She has violet-colored eyes, a short nose, and her dark blond hair is smoothed over the top of her head and pulled back. She also wears long gloves with her arms crossed on the lap of her ice-blue gown. Along the right edge of hte painting, a sliver of a form mirroring the torso, shoulder, and back of the head of the young woman to our right appears just beyond her shoulder, painted in tones of cool blues. Two curving bands in golden yellow and spring green swiped with darker shades of green and gold arc behind the girls and fill the background. The space between the curves is filled with strokes of plum purple, dark red, and pink. The artist signed the lower right, “Mary Cassatt.”

A cultivated woman, Mary Cassatt was at home at the theater and opera. In The Loge she depicts two elegantly dressed young women who sit primly in their theater box absorbed in the performance below. The figures are shown close-up, suggesting that we share both their vantage point and their experience of the performance. Reflected in a large mirror behind them, a glittering chandelier illuminates the tiers of gilded balconies that curve majestically around the auditorium. Aware that they are on view from the other boxes, the young women appear slightly self-conscious. One young woman retreats behind her fan. The other clutches her bouquet; her carefully neutral expression establishes a discreet emotional distance.

Cassatt was as attentive to the formal qualities of composition as to the individualization of the figures. Here the sweeping lines of the balconies in the background and the spread of the open fan establish the pattern for this carefully organized composition. The curves are echoed in the black neck ribbon, the rounded shoulders, the arc of the bouquet, and the crystal chandelier. Eliminating details with loose brushwork and softly merging colors, Cassatt suggested rather than defined such elements as the flowers on the fan and the distant audience. Elsewhere, in the arms for example, she emphasized form by allowing the brushstrokes to follow contours and, at times, by using pure line to emphasize a particular shape. The resulting image is, at once, solid and evanescent.

The Loge, 1882, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.96

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Two pale-skinned little girls sit back-to-back on a sandy beach, almost filling the width of this vertical painting. The girls wear matching pale, ice-blue pinafores over short sleeve, ocean-blue dresses. Both sit with their legs stretched in front of them and angled to our right. The girl closest to us, to our left, looks down at the denim-blue pail and wooden shovel she holds between her ankles. She holds the long-handled shovel in her near hand with the end inside the pail. She has a chubby, flushed, round face with blond hair and rosy arms and legs. She wears black shoes and appears to have a brown sock on her near leg but a dark blue sock on the other. Her companion sits just beyond her and to our right with her body turned away from us. Her wide-brimmed straw hat is trimmed with a tomato-red ribbon tied in a bow at the front. The hat hides her face, and her outstretched legs are encased in olive-green stockings. Her near hand reaches across her lap to grab the pail sitting on the far side of her legs. The beach meets the pale blue and aquamarine ocean in the upper third of the painting. A patch of strokes and daubs of dark blue and peach near the upper left and a tan wedge in the water to our right are painted loosely along the shoreline. Two white sailboats and a horizontal white dash with three dark blue dots drift on the water. The artist signed the lower right, “Mary Cassatt.”

Children Playing on a Beach demonstrates Mary Cassatt's skill at capturing the natural attitudes of children. The intent expression on one child's face, the lowered angles of their heads, and the set of their shoulders suggest complete concentration on their activities. Especially appealing is the awkward way in which the toddler on the left grips the long handle of her shovel while holding the rim of the bucket with her other pudgy hand.

Cassatt's interest in structure and strong sense of patterning comes through clearly in this painting. Her careful brushstrokes follow the contours of the girls' arms, legs, and heads, creating the solid areas of color typical of her work after 1883. To keep the center of attention on the little girls, Cassatt treated the seascape background more loosely; the boats on the ocean melt into a haze of natural light. She emphasized surface pattern by repeating the accents of dark dresses under crisp white pinafores.

Children Playing on the Beach, 1884, oil on canvas, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection, 1970.17.19

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We look slightly down onto a round faced girl with flushed, pale skin sitting almost in profile on a ladderback chair, facing our right. Shown from the lap up, she almost takes up the height of this vertical painting. She wears a voluminous, ice-blue chemise with elbow-length sleeves and a round, sapphire-blue earring in the ear we can see. Her head is tilted slightly back as she reaches up with both hands. With her right hand, closer to us, she holds the end of a chestnut-brown braid hanging over that shoulder. Her other elbow points upward as she touches hair at the base of the neck. Her lips and face are deeply flushed in her otherwise pale face. Her mouth hangs slightly open, revealing white teeth as her half-closed violet-colored eyes gaze off to our right. She sits in the corner of a room with wallpaper decorated in a pattern of tree limbs and leaves in cranberry red and slate blue on a mauve-pink background. A peanut-brown dresser behind her is covered with a white cloth on which sit a white cup and glass pitcher with a tapered neck. A white porcelain ewer and washbasin, tinged with blue, are partially visible behind her bent left elbow. The lower corner of a mirror in a bamboo frame hangs from the upper right. A portion of a burgundy rug fills the lower left corner.

Girl Arranging Her Hair was greatly admired at the last impressionist exhibition, held in 1886. However, no one praised the painting more highly than Edgar Degas, who acquired the work for his own collection.

Cassatt's theme is one that Degas himself often portrayed: a woman's toilette. Cassatt deliberately chose a plain adolescent as her subject so that appreciation of the painting would not depend on the beauty of the model. Clad in a loose chemise and seated before a washstand and mirror, she performs the routine task of coiling her hair. The girl's pose is awkward but natural, imparting grace and rhythm to the composition. The S-curve formed by her arms and the twist of her hair creates a fluid surface pattern.

Recalling the lessons of the past when composing this picture, the painter looked back to the Renaissance for inspiration. To show the natural beauty of the young girl's gesture, Cassatt adopted the uplifted bent arm and turned head of Michelangelo's sculpture, The Dying Slave. Yet, the ambiguity of space, the overlapping patterns of furnishings and wallpaper, as well as the elevated angle of vision in this painting, all seem to come from another source--Japanese woodcuts. Cassatt was long an admirer of the bold style in Oriental prints. By 1886, when this picture was done, she had fully analyzed them and mastered their compositional strategies.

Girl Arranging Her Hair, 1886, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.97

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Shown from the waist up, a young girl wearing a slate-gray dress and straw hat stands with her hands clasped in front of her in this vertical portrait painting. The girl has light, peachy skin, and her cheeks are lightly flushed. Her body faces us but she tips her head slightly to her right, our left, and looks off into the distance with dark brown eyes. Her faint eyebrows drawn together, and her cherry-red, full lips slightly turn down at the corners. She has a button nose and a rounded chin line. She has dark blond, straight, shoulder-length hair under a wide, flat-brimmed straw hat. The hat is wrapped around the crown with a checkered white and black bow. Her shoulders slope down as she holds one wrist with the other hand down in front of her. She wears a jumper over a shirt with short white sleeves. At first glance the jumper appears pale gray but closer inspection reveals strokes of pale lilac, ivory white, and cobalt blue. The girl’s features and clothing are painted with loose, visible brushstrokes, and the background behind her is painted with vertical strokes of tan blended with faint green. Short dabs of brighter gold and butter yellow give the impression of sunshine on the brim of the hat and in the girl’s hair. The artist signed the work with loose letters in the lower right corner, “Mary Cassatt.”

Later in her career Mary Cassatt often painted the theme of a little girl wearing an oversized hat in poses similar to this one. However this child's serious expression sets the painting apart from other portraits. Most of the girls in Cassatt's paintings of children in hats appear to be willing and happy models; they smile and wear elaborate bonnets and frilly dresses. In Child in a Straw Hat, the little girl wears a plain, gray pinafore and a large, simple straw hat. Her furrowed brow and protruding upper lip suggest that she is impatient; she may have been taken away from her play in order to pose.

Child in a Straw Hat, c. 1886, oil on canvas, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1983.1.17

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Mary Cassatt had great respect for the art of Manet and Degas. Portrait of an Elderly Lady demonstrates her admiration for Edouard Manet through her use of large dark areas, near black, and warm flesh tones applied with the rich, broad brushstrokes typical of Manet's work.

Although the identity of the sitter in Portrait of an Elderly Lady is unknown, she appears in other works by the artist. Cassatt paints the woman with characteristic candor, including gray hair and wrinkles. Sitting on a chintz upholstered slipper chair with her elbow slung across the top, her casual pose exudes self-confidence. The large, pink rose in her bonnet is a youthful symbol that brightens her dark attire.

Portrait of an Elderly Lady, c. 1887, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.7

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Shown from the knees up, a young woman with peachy skin and red hair sits facing us on a pine-green bench in this vertical painting. She sits with her body angled to our right, and her left elbow, on our right, hooks over the top slat of the bench. Her head tilts slightly to our right to rest on the curled fingers of that hand. In her other hand, she holds up a red flower on a short stem. Her hair is pulled up and back over a high forehead, and her cheeks are deeply flushed. Her pink lips are closed, and she looks down and to our left at the flower with gray eyes. She has an oval-shaped face and a hint of a double chin. Her white dress is painted with ice-blue shadows and folds. It has a deep V neck that reaches to an apron-like pinafore patterned with vertical bands of pale lilac that alternate with angled daubs of blue. Beyond her is a loosely painted landscape with grassy areas and clusters of tall trees painted in spring, emerald, and sea glass green. The edge of the grassy field nearly brushes the top edge of the canvas, and the trees are cropped by it. The artist signed the lower right, “Mary Cassatt.”

The model in Woman with a Red Zinnia is an example of the type of figure who often appears in Cassatt's works; she is plain and sturdy, rather than glamorous or idealized. Cassatt often painted the local women who lived near her in the country, dressing them in clothes she bought in Paris.

Woman with a Red Zinnia, which was exhibited at least once with the title Reverie, follows a Victorian tradition of depicting women in a dreamlike state. The artist's frank representation focuses attention on the sitter's contemplative mood.

Woman with a Red Zinnia, 1891, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.99

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We look slightly down into a lime-green and white rowboat carrying a woman holding a baby and a man in this nearly square painting. The man wears midnight-blue shoes, pants, jacket, and soft, floppy cap. He sits with his back to us, bending forward to row the boat, which is cropped by the bottom edge of the canvas. The left side of his ruddy face is visible over his left shoulder. The woman and baby both have pale skin. The woman and baby sit across from the man, facing us to our left in the bow. The woman’s long-sleeved, sky-blue dress is crosshatched with pink lines. The baby leans back in the woman’s arms, and wears a pink dress, blue socks, and brown shoes. The wide-brimmed hats on both the woman and baby are painted pale celery green. They gaze toward or just past the man. The corner of the boat’s sail, also painted pale green, is pulled taunt by the wind to our left. Azure-blue water surrounds the boat up to the high horizon line, which brushes the top edge of the painting. The shoreline in the distance is lined with trees and dotted with white houses with red roofs.

Mary Cassatt created The Boating Party in the winter of 1893/1894 at Antibes, on the Mediterranean coast in France. It is representative of Cassatt's finest period. Just two years earlier, as a mature and accomplished artist, she had had her first one-person exhibition in which her extraordinary series of ten color prints were shown. Among other exciting innovations, these works demonstrated the influence of her recent encounter with the Japanese prints exhibited at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1890. In The Boating Party, the high horizon, off-center placement of figures, elimination of unnecessary detail, and preoccupation with surface patterns and contours also reveal this awareness of Japanese art.

For the picture's subject matter Cassatt may have drawn upon Edouard Manet's Boating (1874, Metropolitan Museum of Art), a painting that she greatly admired. Like Manet, who himself admired Japanese woodcuts, she used a close-up view, with the nearest portion of the boat cut off at the edge of the image. But her dazzling color scheme and broad, flat brushwork are post-impressionist in flavor--the color preferences of Gauguin and Van Gogh.

The composition of The Boating Party is, as in the most interesting of Cassatt's paintings, unconventional and arresting. The darkly clad figure of the boatman looms large in the foreground, almost appearing to project out of the canvas. The sail at left, the oar, and the bow of the boat all point to the head of the child who, in a pose typical of the artist, is shown sprawling gracelessly, yet naturally, in its mother's lap. Despite the simple subject and the centrality of the contented baby, the painting exudes a peculiar psychological intensity because of the enigmatic relationship between the figures so closely tied together in the composition. In conception, execution, and sheer size, this is surely Cassatt's boldest work.

The Boating Party, 1893/1894, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.94

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We look slightly down onto a woman dressed in golden yellows, sitting in a pale green chair, with a nude child sitting in her lap as they both gaze into a mirror in this vertical portrait painting. Both the people have pale, peachy skin. The chair is angled to our left so the woman’s knees and child cant down toward the lower left corner of the composition, and the woman leans onto the arm closer to us. The chair is painted mint green and the rose-pink upholstery is visible on the seat and a corner behind the woman’s shoulder. To our right, the woman’s vibrant, copper-colored hair is pulled loosely to the back of her head. She has a rounded nose, flushed cheeks, and her full, coral-pink lips are closed. Her long dress has a low, U-shaped neckline. The fabric shimmers from pale, cucumber green to light sunshine yellow. The sleeves of the dress split over the shoulder and a second long, goldenrod-yellow sleeve falls from her elbow off the bottom edge of the canvas. An oversized sunflower, larger than the woman’s face, is affixed to her dress near her left shoulder, closer to us. She looks with dark eyes down toward the small, gold-rimmed mirror she holds in her right hand, farther from us. The child also holds the handle of the mirror with both hands, and in the reflection, the child looks back at us with dark eyes, a button nose, and pink lips. The child’s hair in the reflection is the same copper color as the woman’s, but the child on her lap has blond, shoulder-length hair. The woman rests one hand on the child’s left shoulder, closer to us. The child has a rounded belly and smooth, rosy limbs. The woman and child are reflected in a second mirror hanging on the wall alongside them, opposite us. Their reflections are very loosely painted. The wall behind the pair is sage green across the top and it shifts to fawn brown across the bottom. Brushstrokes are visible throughout, especially in the woman’s dress and hair, and are more blended in the bodies and faces. The artist signed the painting in the lower right corner, “Mary Cassatt.”

Mother and Child represents a theme that Mary Cassatt often painted throughout her career as an artist. Creating complex, impressionistic lighting effects, a floor mirror reflects the scene in a hazy, indistinct manner.

The models for Mother and Child may have been neighbors of Cassatt's near her country home outside of Paris. She often asked local women to sit for her, feeling that professional models posed self-consciously. For the sittings, Cassatt tended to dress the women in gowns she had bought from well-known Paris clothiers. As in most of her paintings, Cassatt does not glamorize or sentimentalize her subjects; instead she presents them as wholesome, attractive individuals.

When Cassatt painted Mother and Child she was at the height of her artistic success. She drew on her many years of experience, working with ease and assurance. She captured the varying effects of light: pure strokes of green and gold suggest the sun flooding the artist's studio on a summer day, and glistening touches of pale yellow highlight hair, dress, and furniture.

Mother and Child, c. 1905, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.98

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