© Copyright 2005 Paul van Rensburg.
IMPRESSIONISM:
BIOGRAPHIES:
NEO-IMPRESSIONISM:
At the end of the following year, Mary had her second one-woman show at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris, and she bought the Chateau de Beaufresne at Mesnil-Theribus on the Oise, 27 miles from Paris, which was to be her summer home for the rest of her life.
It was not until 1898 that Mary Cassatt visited America for the first time since she had settled in Paris in 1874, in order to see her family and friends. After her mother died in 1898, there were no close family links to keep her in Europe, and she was free to visit her brothers Gardner and Alexander and their families in Philadelphia and Boston. While in America, Mary Cassatt decided to concentrate on pastels alone, as they were more portable than oils, and therefore more suitable for the journey home. Most of the subjects she painted there were women and children.
Her attention was rather diverted from her own work when she returned to Europe; she made an extended visit to Italy with the Havemyers to advise on the purchase of paintings, many of which can now be seen in American museums.
The artist continued to produce a large number of paintings and pastels during the early years of the century, and she managed to preserve her good health and strength until she was in her sixties. However, after a tragic trip to Egypt in 1912 during which her brother Gardner died, she found herself depressed, ill, and unable to work for almost two years.
Her eyesight was gradually failing due to inoperable cataracts and because of this, the colours in her pastels became more and more strident and less subtle, although the artist considered them to be her best works.
After a last surge of work in 1913, Mary Cassatt stopped producing pictures almost entirely, and retired to the South of France during the first world war. She lived on in seclusion and virtual blindness, unable to work, until her death on June 14, 1926 at the Chateau de Beaufresne. Mary Cassatt was buried in the family vault at nearby Mesnil-Théribus.
In recognition of her contributions to the arts, France awarded her the Légion d'honneur in 1904.
The majority of Cassatt’s works today are in American collections, while just a small number of paintings remain in France, where she worked.
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)
The most famous female Impressionist painter, Mary Cassatt, was born on 22 May, 1844 in Allegheny, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Cassatt family was affluent and cultured, Mary's father being a stockbroker, while her mother, who came from an old established Pennsylvania family, was an accomplished woman who spoke French and read widely. Cassatt grew up in an environment that viewed travel as integral to education and before she was 10 years old she had already visited many of the capitals of Europe, including London, Paris, and Berlin. This travel enabled Mary to learn both French and German while she was still young - linguistic skills that were prove immensely useful in later life.
In 1861, when she was sixteen, Mary Cassatt decided to study art seriously and enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, despite her family's objections to her becoming a professional artist. 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 and in 1866 she moved to Paris. She remained there for four years before moving back to the United States with her mother at the outset of the Franco-Prussian War.
Cassatt became known as a portrait painter and was sought after by American visitors to France. Her work differed from the stiff academic tradition of portrait painting as a mere likeness insofar as most of her subjects were either engaged in some kind of activity or caught in a casual pose.
Cassatt knew and befriended Edouard Manet. The two artists lived near each other, had mutual friends, and met from time to time. Although she and Manet did not seem to have the same close relationship that she had with Edgar Degas, Cassatt knew him well, and in 1880 even spent the summer with her family at Marly-le-Roi near Manet's villa. She was also highly influenced by his art, and many of her early works show Manet's broad touch and his strong tonal contrasts. She was responsible for sending many of his paintings to America.
The early years in Paris were a particularly happy time for Mary Cassatt, and this gaiety is reflected in the subject matter she chose for her paintings. She depicted young girls setting in the loge at the opera, women taking tea, knitting and reading. Many of her models were drawn from her close family and friends, such as her mother and her sister Lydia. On the whole, Cassatt preferred to paint peasant women who took care of their own children, rather than the more affluent mothers who delegated the task to nannies or nursemaids.
The jury accepted her first painting for the Paris Salon in 1872. The Salon critics claimed that her colours were too bright and that her portraits were too accurate to be flattering to the subjects.
Upon seeing pastels by Edgar Degas in an art dealer's window, though, she knew she was not alone in her rebellion against the Salon. "I used to go and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his art," she wrote to a friend. "It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it." She met Degas in 1874, with whom she was to be on close terms throughout his life and he invited her to join the Impressionists at a time when Cassatt was more than ready to cast off the academic conventions of the Salon. Cassatt was to become the only American whose work would appear in the Impressionist exhibitions of 1879, 1880, 1881, and 1886.
She was a great practical support to the Impressionist movement as a whole, both by providing direct financial help and by promoting the works of Impressionists in the USA, largely through her brother Alexander. By persuading him to buy works by Manet, Monet, Morisot, Renoir, Degas and Pissarro, she made him the first important collector of such works in America. She also advised and encouraged her friends the Havemeyers to build up their important collection of works by Impressionists and other contemporary French artists. Her own works, on the occasions when they were shown in various mixed exhibitions in the USA, were very favourably received by the critics and contributed not a little to the acceptance of Impressionism there.
Like Degas, Cassatt became extremely proficient in the use of pastel, eventually painting many of her most important works in this medium. She continued to paint modern women after she joined the Impressionists. By the 1880s, her imagery had become more domestic and interior, but no less modern. Cassatt's women engage in contemporary rituals of womanhood, whether sewing, reading or drinking tea, they exuded a sense of dignity and purpose that challenged conventional notions of decorative femininity. As her style evolved, she began moving away from impressionism to a simpler, more straightforward approach. By 1886, she no longer identified herself with any art movement and experimented with a variety of techniques.
Cassatt is perhaps best-known for her paintings of mothers and children, works which also reflect a surprisingly modern sensibility. Traditional assumptions concerning childhood, child-rearing, and the place of children in society were facing challenges during the last part of the 19th century and women too were reconsidering and redefining their place in modern culture. Cassatt was sensitive to a more progressive attitude toward women and children and displayed it in her art as well as in her private comments. She recognized the moral strength that women and children derived from their essential and elemental bond, a unity Cassatt would never tire of representing.
Mary Cassatt especially liked children, doting on her nieces and nephews and the offspring of friends. Naturalism and sensuality of a pure, elemental, and nonsexual sort are the hallmarks of Cassatt's portrayals of childhood during the 1880s and 1890s. An example is Children on the Shore, which she showed at the last Impressionist exhibition, in 1886. While this seaside subject is unique in her oeuvre, the close-up focus on the pair of toddlers and the firm draftsmanship are typical of the artist's style in the 1880s.
After 1886, Cassatt discovered an interesting and viable alternative to the Impressionist shows in the burgeoning peintres-graveurs (painters-printmakers) movement. Beginning in 1889, this group began to organize exhibitions at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris, also the primary dealer of the Impressionists. Although already an innovative and original printmaker beginning as early as 1879, Cassatt's involvement with the peintres-graveurs, coupled with an 1890 visit to a large and highly influential Japanese print exhibition in Paris, spurred the artist to focus more intently on making her own colour prints later in 1890. Her suite of 10 delicately coloured drypoints and aquatints represents a landmark in the history of printmaking. Loosely based on aspects of Japanese prints she had seen in Paris, the album was so technically sophisticated and deceptively complex that Cassatt had the printer who assisted her place his signature alongside her own.
The 1890's were Cassatt's busiest and most creative time. 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. As the new century arrived, she served as an advisor to several major art collectors and stipulated that they eventually donate their purchases to American art museums. Although instrumental in advising the American collectors, recognition of her art came more slowly in the United States.
In 1891, Mary Cassatt had her first one-woman show at the gallery of Durand-Ruel. The year after, she was invited by Mrs. Potter Palmer to paint a monumental decoration for the world's fair in Chicago. This mural, called Modern Woman, was a three-part composition, which established her reputation in the United States. In the center she showed "Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge and Science", on the left-hand panel she showed "Young Girls Pursuing Fame", and on the right she depicted the arts of music and dancing. Unfortunately this mural was lost, most probably destroyed, after the conclusion of the fair.
During the winter of 1893-1894 Mary Cassatt resided in Antibes, recovering from the effort of producing her colour prints and the mural for Chicago. It was there she began to paint one of her largest canvasses, The Boating Party, which was highly influenced by Manet's painting In the Boat, which she had persuaded the Havemyers to buy for their collection.
During her two years stay in the United States, she found that art supplies and models were difficult to find in her small town and her father also continued to resist her vocation, paying only for her basic needs, but not her art supplies. The atmosphere at home was so discouraging that she almost gave up painting. Eventually, in 1872, she returned to Europe when the archbishop of Pittsburgh commissioned her to paint copies of paintings in Italy, and from then on she virtually became an exile from her native country.
On her return to Europe, Mary Cassatt went to Parma in Italy where she stayed for several months studying the paintings of the Italian Masters Correggio and Parmagianino, and where she may have also studied graphic art with Carlo Raimondi. It says a great deal about the determination of the young artist that she was prepared to brave a somewhat lonely and isolated existence in order to achieve her aim. It is also significant that she should have felt a need to turn to these two particular painters, as they were both masters of the Madonna-and-child theme, and subject paintings of women and children were to prove so critical to her own work.
From Parma, the artist went to Madrid, where she spent some time absorbing the lessons of Velazquez in the Prado, and where she painted the Spanish-influenced Torero and a Young Girl. From Madrid, Mary went to Antwerp where she studied the art of Rubens for a time.
In 1874 Cassatt finally decided to settle in Paris. Aided by her elder sister, Lydia, who joined Mary in Europe, she took an apartment and studio. Lydia was not only the elder sister, but also the closest friend and model of Mary. There are eleven known works with Lydia, among them are The Cup of Tea, Lydia Working at a Tapestry Loom, Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly, Woman and Child Driving. Lydia died at the end of 1882 of Bright’s disease, and it was a severe blow to Mary.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/cassatt/
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/C/cassatt.html
http://www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/cassatt/cassatt-main1.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Cassatt
http://www.tfaoi.com/newsmu/nmus1d.htm
http://www.abcgallery.com/C/cassatt/cassatt.html
http://www.artelino.com/articles/mary_cassatt.asp
http://www.nmwa.org/collection/profile.asp?LinkID=128
http://www.wetcanvas.com/Museum/Artists/c/Mary_Cassatt/
IMPRESSIONISM:
BIOGRAPHIES:
NEO-IMPRESSIONISM: