Mary Cassatt

Early life

Cassatt was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, which is now part of Pittsburgh. She was born into an upper-middle-class family: Her father, Robert Simpson Cassat (later Cassatt), was a successful stockbroker and land speculator. The ancestral name had been Cossart, with the family descended from French Huguenot Jacques Cossart, who came to New Amsterdam in 1662. Her mother, Katherine Kelso Johnston, came from a banking family. Katherine Cassatt, educated and well-read, had a profound influence on her daughter. To that effect, Cassatt's lifelong friend Louisine Havemeyer wrote in her memoirs: "Anyone who had the privilege of knowing Mary Cassatt's mother would know at once that it was from her and her alone that [Mary] inherited her ability." A distant cousin of artist Robert Henri, Cassatt was one of seven children, of whom two died in infancy. One brother, Alexander Johnston Cassatt, later became president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The family moved eastward, first to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, then to the Philadelphia area, where she started her schooling at the age of six.

Cassatt grew up in an environment that viewed travel as an integral part of a well-rounded education. She spent five years in Europe and visited many of the capitals, including London, Paris, and Berlin. While abroad, she learned German and French and had her first lessons in drawing and music. It is likely that her first exposure to French artists Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, Camille Corot, and Gustave Courbet was at the Paris World's Fair of 1855. Also in the exhibition were Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro, both of whom were later her colleagues and mentors.

Though her family objected to her becoming a professional artist, Cassatt began studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia at the early age of 15. Part of her parents' concern may have been Cassatt's exposure to feminist ideas and the bohemian behavior of some of the male students. Cassatt and her network of friends became lifelong advocates of equal rights for the sexes. Although about 20% of the students were female, most viewed art as a socially valuable skill. Few of them were determined, as Cassatt was, to make art their career. She continued her studies from 1861 through 1865, during the American Civil War. Thomas Eakins was among her fellow students; he was later forced to resign as director of the academy.

Impatient with the slow pace of instruction and the patronizing attitude of the male students and teachers, she decided to study the old masters on her own. She later said: "There was no teaching" at the academy. Female students could not use live models until somewhat later, and the principal training was primarily drawing from casts.

Cassatt decided to end her studies. At that time, no degree was granted. After overcoming her father's objections, she moved to Paris in 1866, with her mother and family friends acting as chaperones. Since women could not yet attend the École des Beaux-Arts, Cassatt applied to study privately with masters from the school and was accepted to study with Jean-Léon Gérôme, a highly regarded teacher known for his hyper-realistic technique and his depiction of exotic subjects. (A few months later, Gérôme also accepted Eakins as a student.) Cassatt augmented her artistic training with daily copying in the Louvre, obtaining the required permit, which was necessary to control the "copyists", usually low-paid women, who daily filled the museum to paint copies for sale. The museum also served as a social place for Frenchmen and American female students, who, like Cassatt, were not allowed to attend cafes where the avant-garde socialized. In this manner, fellow artist and friend Elizabeth Jane Gardner met and married famed academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

Toward the end of 1866, she joined a painting class taught by Charles Joshua Chaplin, a genre artist. In 1868, Cassatt also studied with artist Thomas Couture, whose subjects were mostly romantic and urban. On trips to the countryside, the students drew from life, particularly the peasants going about their daily activities. In 1868, one of her paintings, A Mandoline Player, was accepted for the first time by the selection jury for the Paris Salon. With Elizabeth Jane Gardner, whose work was also accepted by the jury that year, Cassatt was one of two American women to first exhibit in the Salon. A Mandoline Player is in the Romantic style of Corot and Couture, and is one of only two paintings from the first decade of her career that is documented today.

The French art scene was in a process of change, as radical artists such as Courbet and Édouard Manet tried to break away from accepted Academic tradition, and the Impressionists were in their formative years. Cassatt's friend Eliza Haldeman wrote home that artists "are leaving the Academy style and each seeking a new way, consequently just now everything is Chaos." Cassatt, on the other hand, continued to work in the traditional manner, submitting works to the Salon for over ten years, with increasing frustration.

Returning to the United States in the late summer of 1870—as the Franco-Prussian War was starting—Cassatt lived with her family in Altoona. Her father continued to resist her chosen vocation, paying for her basic needs but not her art supplies. Cassatt placed two of her paintings in a New York gallery and found many admirers but no purchasers. She was also dismayed at the lack of paintings to study while staying at her summer residence. Cassatt even considered giving up art, as she was determined to make a living independently. She wrote in a letter of July 1871, "I have given up my studio & torn up my father's portrait, & have not touched a brush for six weeks nor ever will again until I see some prospect of getting back to Europe. I am very anxious to go out west next fall & get some employment, but I have not yet decided where."

Cassatt traveled to Chicago to try her luck, but lost some of her early paintings in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Shortly afterward, her work attracted the attention of Roman Catholic Bishop Michael Domenec of Pittsburgh, who commissioned her to paint two copies of paintings by Correggio in Parma, Italy, advancing her enough money to cover her travel expenses and part of her stay. In her excitement she wrote, "O how wild I am to get to work, my fingers farely itch & my eyes water to see a fine picture again". With Emily Sartain, a fellow artist from a well-regarded artistic family from Philadelphia, Cassatt set out for Europe again.

Impressionism

Within months of her return to Europe in the autumn of 1871, Cassatt's prospects had brightened. Her painting Two Women Throwing Flowers During Carnival was well received in the Salon of 1872 and was purchased. She attracted much favorable notice in Parma and was supported and encouraged by the art community there: "All Parma is talking of Miss Cassatt and her picture, and everyone is anxious to know her".

After completing her commission for the bishop, Cassatt traveled to Madrid and Seville, where she painted a group of paintings of Spanish subjects, including Spanish Dancer Wearing a Lace Mantilla (1873, in the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). In 1874, she made the decision to take up residence in France. She was joined by her sister, Lydia, who shared an apartment with her. Cassatt opened a studio in Paris. Louisa May Alcott's sister, Abigail May Alcott, was then an art student in Paris and visited Cassatt. Cassatt continued to express criticism of the politics of the Salon and the conventional taste that prevailed there. She was blunt in her comments, as reported by Sartain, who wrote: "she is entirely too slashing, snubs all modern art, disdains the Salon pictures of Cabanel, Bonnat, all the names we are used to revere".

Cassatt saw that works by female artists were often dismissed with contempt unless the artist had a friend or protector on the jury, and she would not flirt with jurors to curry favor. Her cynicism grew when one of the two pictures she submitted in 1875 was refused by the jury, only to be accepted the following year after she darkened the background. She had quarrels with Sartain, who thought Cassatt too outspoken and self-centered, and eventually they parted. Out of her distress and self-criticism, Cassatt decided that she needed to move away from genre paintings and onto more fashionable subjects, in order to attract portrait commissions from American socialites abroad, but that attempt bore little fruit at first.

In 1877, both her entries were rejected, and for the first time in seven years, she had no works in the Salon. At this low point in her career, she was invited by Edgar Degas to show her works with the Impressionists, a group that had begun their own series of independent exhibitions in 1874 with much attendant notoriety. The Impressionists (also known as the "Independents" or "Intransigents") had no formal manifesto and varied considerably in subject matter and technique. They tended to prefer plein air painting and the application of vibrant color in separate strokes with little pre-mixing, which allows the eye to merge the results in an "impressionistic" manner. The Impressionists had been receiving the wrath of the critics for several years. Henry Bacon, a friend of the Cassatts, thought that the Impressionists were so radical that they were "afflicted with some hitherto unknown disease of the eye". They already had one female member, artist Berthe Morisot, who became Cassatt's friend and colleague. The only American officially associated with the Impressionists, Cassatt would go on to exhibit in half of the group's later exhibitions

Feminist viewpoints and the "New Woman"

Cassatt and her contemporaries enjoyed the wave of feminism that occurred in the 1840s, allowing them access to educational institutions at newly coed colleges and universities, such as Oberlin and the University of Michigan. Likewise, women's colleges such as Vassar, Smith and Wellesley opened their doors during this time. Cassatt was an outspoken advocate for women's equality, campaigning with her friends for equal travel scholarships for students in the 1860s, and the right to vote in the 1910s.

Mary Cassatt depicted the "New Woman" of the 19th century from the woman's perspective. As a successful, highly trained woman artist who never married, Cassatt—like Ellen Day Hale, Elizabeth Coffin, Elizabeth Nourse and Cecilia Beaux—personified the "New Woman". She "initiated the profound beginnings in recreating the image of the 'new' woman", drawn from the influence of her intelligent and active mother, Katherine Cassatt, who believed in educating women to be knowledgeable and socially active. She is depicted in Reading 'Le Figaro' (1878).

Cassatt's independence and choice not to marry as a "New Woman" could also be seen as a reaction to the strict institutionalized misogamy of the art world at the time, in which a woman artist's marriage could have been seen as incompatible with any serious artistic career.

Although Cassatt did not explicitly make political statements about women's rights in her work, her artistic portrayal of women was consistently done with dignity and the suggestion of a deeper, meaningful inner life. Many of her works depict a mother caring for a child and she painted them with warmth and attention. Unlike the other Impressionists of the time who often painted street scenes and landscapes, Cassatt preferred to depict the everyday life of women and the domestic labors associated with the home. This was unusual at the time because, while Impressionist pieces typically depicted women as passive objects for the viewer, Cassatt notably made the women she painted active observers with real engagement in their environments. Cassatt's work was shaped by her time spent engaging with these women in their private, intimate spaces, something that a male artist would not have had the social ability to do at that time. This disconnect from what the two different genders were allowed to observe as artists did not go unnoticed by Cassatt, and she notably enjoyed observing the complexities of gender relations in her work. The piece In the Loge (1878) is a good example of this, as it depicts a young woman watching the opera while a male admirer gawks at her from afar. The viewer is then also included in the voyeuristic objectification of the unaware model, exposing the social dynamics of the time.

Relationship with Degas

Cassatt and Degas had a long period of collaboration. The two painters had studios close together, Cassatt at 19, rue Laval, Degas at 4, rue Frochot, less than a five-minute walk apart, and Degas developed the habit of looking in at Cassatt's studio and offering her advice and helping her gain models.

They had much in common: they shared similar tastes in art and literature, came from affluent backgrounds, had studied painting in Italy, and both were independent, never marrying. The degree of intimacy between them cannot be assessed now, as no letters survive, but it is unlikely they were in a sexual relationship, given their conservative social backgrounds and strong adherence to the prevalent notions of sexual morality at the time. Several of Vincent van Gogh's letters attest to Degas' sexual self-constraint. Degas introduced Cassatt to pastel and engraving, both of which Cassatt quickly mastered, while for her part, Cassatt was instrumental in helping Degas sell his paintings and promoting his reputation in America.

Both regarded themselves as figure painters, and the art historian George Shackelford suggests they were influenced by the art critic Louis Edmond Duranty's appeal in his pamphlet The New Painting for a revitalization in figure painting: "Let us take leave of the stylized human body, which is treated like a vase. What we need is the characteristic modern person in his clothes, in the midst of his social surroundings, at home or out in the street."

After Cassatt's parents and sister, Lydia, joined Cassatt in Paris in 1877, Degas, Cassatt, and Lydia were often to be seen at the Louvre studying artworks together. Degas produced two prints, notable for their technical innovation, depicting Cassatt at the Louvre looking at artworks while Lydia reads a guidebook. These were destined for a prints journal planned by Degas (together with Camille Pissarro and others), which never came to fruition. Cassatt frequently posed for Degas, notably for his millinery series trying on hats.

Around 1884, Degas made a portrait in oils of Cassatt, Mary Cassatt Seated, Holding Cards. A Self-Portrait (c. 1880) by Cassatt depicts her in the identical hat and dress, leading art historian Griselda Pollock to speculate they were executed in a joint painting session in the early years of their acquaintance.

Later life

Cassatt's reputation is based on an extensive series of rigorously drawn and tenderly observed paintings and prints on the theme of the mother and child. The earliest dated work on this subject is the drypoint Gardner Held by His Mother (an impression inscribed "Jan/88" is in the New York Public Library), although she had painted a few earlier works on the theme. Some of these works depict her own relatives, friends, or clients, although in her later years she generally used professional models in compositions that are often reminiscent of Italian Renaissance depictions of the Madonna and Child. After 1900, she concentrated almost exclusively on mother-and-child subjects, such as Woman with a Sunflower. Viewers may be surprised to find that despite her focus on portraying mother-child pairs in her portraits, "Cassatt rejected the idea of becoming a wife and mother..."

The 1890s were Cassatt's busiest and most creative period. She had matured considerably and became more diplomatic and less blunt in her opinions. She also became a role model for young American artists who sought her advice. Among them was Lucy A. Bacon, whom Cassatt introduced to Camille Pissarro. Though the Impressionist group disbanded, Cassatt still had contact with some of the members, including Renoir, Monet, and Pissarro.

In 1891, she exhibited a series of highly original colored drypoint and aquatint prints, including Woman Bathing and The Coiffure, inspired by the Japanese masters shown in Paris the year before. (See Japonism) Cassatt was attracted to the simplicity and clarity of Japanese design and the skillful use of blocks of color. In her interpretation, she used primarily light, delicate pastel colors and avoided black. Adelyn D. Breeskin, the author of two catalogue raisonnés of Cassatt's work, comments that these colored prints, "now stand as her most original contribution... adding a new chapter to the history of graphic arts...technically, as color prints, they have never been surpassed".

Also in 1891, Chicago socialite Bertha Palmer approached Cassatt to paint a 12' × 58' mural about "Modern Woman" for the Women's Building for the World's Columbian Exposition to be held in 1893. Cassatt completed the project over the next two years while living in France with her mother. The mural was designed as a triptych. The central theme was titled Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge or Science. The left panel was Young Girls Pursuing Fame and the right panel Arts, Music, Dancing. The mural displays a community of women apart from their relation to men, as accomplished persons in their own right. Palmer considered Cassatt to be an American treasure and could think of no one better to paint a mural at an exposition that was to do so much to focus the world's attention on the status of women. Following the world's fair, the mural came into Bertha Palmer's possession, where it remained as late as 1911, but it disappeared after Palmer's death in 1918. Cassatt made several studies and paintings on themes similar to those in the mural, so it is possible to see her development of those ideas and images. Cassatt also exhibited other paintings in the Exposition.

Legacy

Mary Cassatt inspired many Canadian women artists who were members of the Beaver Hall Group.

The SS Mary Cassatt was a World War II Liberty ship, launched May 16, 1943.

A quartet of young Juilliard string musicians formed the all-female Cassatt Quartet in 1985, named in honor of the painter. In 2009, the award-winning group recorded String Quartets Nos. 1–3 (Cassatt String Quartet) by composer Dan Welcher; the 3rd quartet on the album was written inspired by the work of Mary Cassatt as well.

In 1966, Cassatt's painting The Boating Party was reproduced on a US postage stamp. Later she was honored by the United States Postal Service with a 23-cent Great Americans series postage stamp.

In 1973, Cassatt was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

In 2003, four of her paintings – Young Mother (1888), Children Playing on the Beach (1884), On a Balcony (1878/79) and Child in a Straw Hat (c. 1886) – were reproduced on the third issue in the American Treasures stamp series.

On May 22, 2009, she was honored by a Google Doodle in recognition of her birthday.

Cassatt's paintings have sold for as much as $4 million, the record price of $4,072,500 being set in 1996 at Christie's, New York, for In the Box.

A public garden in the 12th arrondissement of Paris is named 'Jardin Mary Cassatt' in her memory.

Film

Mary Cassatt: Painting the Modern Woman. Director: Ali Ray, UK, 93 minutes, 2023