An American in Paris

Mary Cassatt’s retrospective at the Musée d’Orsay

By Margie MacKinnon

Above: Mary Cassatt, The Tea, c. 1880 © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Originally published in

RESTORATION CONVERSATIONS magazine

AUTUMN/WINTER, Issue 10

While her friend, rival and fellow Impressionist Berthe Morisot was recognised with exhibitions at the Musée de l’Orangerie in 1941 and the Musée d’Orsay in 2019, it is only now, one hundred years after her death, that Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) is the subject of a solo exhibition at a national French museum. So, this show is long overdue, and, as if to make up for its tardiness, suitably comprehensive. It brings together nearly 80 works from European and American collections, and includes paintings, pastels, drawings and prints. Entitled ‘Being Independent’, the exhibition sets out to demonstrate that Cassatt was not only an independent artist who played a significant role within the group that broke away from the Paris Salon, but an independent woman who made a living from her work, ran her own studio, championed women’s rights and was one of the most influential promoters of Impressionist works in America.

Often thought of as a student of Degas, she was 33 when Degas, impressed with one of her pictures at the 1876 Salon, invited her to exhibit her works with the alternative ‘Independent’ artists. By then, she had studied for two years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, moved to Paris and taken private lessons from the highly regarded master, Jean-Léon Gérôme, obtained a permit to copy paintings in the Louvre and, in 1866, joined a class taught by Charles Chaplin. She had also travelled and studied throughout Italy. She had her first painting accepted by the Salon in 1868. She was never Degas’ pupil, but a lifelong friend, albeit one with whom she regularly quarrelled. Throughout her life, Cassatt remained highly opinionated and wasn’t afraid to let her views be known.

Cassatt enthusiastically accepted Degas’ invitation to join the artists who called themselves Independents (but became known as Impressionists) and exhibited with them in 1879, 1880, 1881 and 1886. She was fiercely loyal to the group and gave up showing at the Salon’s official exhibitions. She welcomed the opportunity to free herself of the strictures imposed by what she saw as outdated Salon styles and to bring a modern sensibility to her work. However, unlike her impressionist contemporaries, she did not often paint en plein air, was not particularly interested in depicting landscapes or capturing fleeting moments on a sunlit beach or park. Her work frequently focussed on the interior lives of women, which is to say, the spaces occupied by women, usually within the home and the activities that preoccupied them there. She posed her models carefully and cropped her pictures to great effect.

In 1874, Cassatt’s contemporary, Eva Gonzalès had drawn censure for her painting of a couple in the theatre box at les Italiens. In 1878, Cassatt’s In the Loge was more radical still in depicting a woman training her opera glasses on the stage, beyond the frame. Perhaps as a concession to propriety, she is dressed modestly in black and holding a fan. The picture is cropped to exclude her less interesting, (presumably) male companion. This is about a woman enjoying a night out, taking in her surroundings and not necessarily in need of company. And yet, Cassatt concedes, as a woman out in Parisian society, she is, inevitably, the object of attention. In the background, we see a man brazenly focusing his binoculars on her. There is no escape from the male gaze.

Mary Cassatt, Mother about to Wash her Sleepy Child, 1880 © Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Among the domestic subjects that Cassatt represented was the social ritual of drinking tea, a familiar activity for women of her class. Le The, painted in 1880, was one of several works on this theme, a treasure trove for social historians of the period. Details of the well-appointed drawing room include the red and white striped wallpaper, the glossy lacquered table and the elaborately framed painting sitting on the carved marble mantelpiece. Occupying pride of place is the slightly over-sized silver tea service. It demands our attention as much as the two women sitting at the table, one of whom is captured just as her face is partially obscured by her teacup. Why choose that moment? Cassatt’s insistence on privileging the composition over the representation of the two protagonists did not find favour with some of the critics who described the painting as “poorly drawn” and only “partially completed”.

Cassatt is perhaps best known as a painter of mothers and babies. In her hands, there is nothing sentimental about these paintings, rather their appeal arises from the artist’s ability to convey the intimacy between the two figures and the naturalness of the posture and expressions of the children. Mother About to Wash her Sleepy Child (1880) is an excellent example of the genre. In an easily recognisable scene, a mother sits in an armchair with a basin of water by her side. She prepares to bathe the child in her lap whose droopy eyelids betray his sleepiness. The child regards the mother with a look of absolute trust and contentment, his body slightly limp, his legs sprawled. We feel the weight of him as she secures him with her free arm. It is a candid portrayal of everyday life, enhanced by Cassatt’s loose brushwork and the subtle interplay of light and shadow across the two figures. It is a sweetly domestic scene, with the mother’s calm and confident presence adding a streak of female strength.

Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1877–78) provides another opportunity to marvel at Cassatt’s ability to capture the mood of a child, in this case, one who seems to have decided that posing for a painting is decidedly less interesting than she had hoped. The little girl in question appears to be about six or seven. She has a ribbon in her hair and her best shoes with the shiny buckles on her feet. Half lying on an armchair, she has slipped down from the position she was posed in. Her tartan skirt has risen up around her waist, and she wears an expression of exasperated boredom. On the chair next to her, a little dog sits comfortably, as if to show her how it is done. One half expects the girl’s mother (or nanny) to rush into the room, insisting that she ‘sit up straight and, for goodness’ sake, pull your skirt down!’ Today, we admire this work for its naturalism, its honest depiction of a child’s reaction to being put in an adult situation. But contemporary viewers, more accustomed to idealised images of childhood, were put off. Much to Cassatt’s dismay, the jury at the American pavilion at the 1878 Paris World’s Fair rejected it.

Mary Cassatt, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878 © National Gallery of Art, Washington

In addition to painting in oil, Cassatt excelled in the use of pastels and, after some experimentation, she also became proficient in printmaking, having been inspired by Japanese prints that were part of the trend for Japonisme that was then popular. Her colour print, Gathering Fruit (1893) shows the exquisite lines in drypoint and subtle colours in aquatint that were characteristic of her work. The theme of women picking fruit would be amplified in Cassatt’s most ambitious work, a monumental mural for the Woman’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In the central panel of the 59 by 13 feet mural, Cassatt created an alternative ‘origin story’ of an Eden in which women symbolically pluck the ‘fruits of knowledge’ and pass them on to the waiting hands of the next generation. This is not the ‘Fall’ of mankind but a world in which knowledge, and the opportunity that comes with it, is available to all. The mural went into storage at the end of the Exposition and, though it is hard to imagine how such a large work could get ‘lost’, there is no record of it after 1912. All that is left are some grainy black and white photographs and a few preparatory sketches and prints.

Along with her own works, Cassatt’s more lasting legacy was her influence on American collectors and museums. She advised her brother Alexander and her friend Louisine Elder to collect Impressionist works. Under Cassatt’s guidance, Elder and her husband Harry Havemeyer amassed a large number of works by Degas, many of which are now to be found in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In 1886, Cassatt provided two paintings of her own for the first Impressionist exhibition in New York, organized by art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. Cassatt’s standing as both an original member of the Impressionist group and an American would help to increase the popularity of the group in her home country.

Cassatt’s life is a study in paradoxes: while fiercely proud to be American, she lived, worked and died in France; classically trained and careful to conform to bourgeois norms, she preferred to associate with rebels whose works were described as ‘a pile of nonsense’; unmarried and with no children of her own, she excelled in portraying the physical and emotional bonds between mother and child. She was an ‘independent’ woman who had the financial support of her wealthy family. Above all, she was an artist at the heart of Impressionism, a champion of ‘modernism’ in her life as well as in her work.

MARGIE MACKINNON