Cassat, Mary
ACHIEVEMENTS: Impressionist painter and model for Degas
DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: 22 May 1844; Allegheny City, PA
DATE/PLACE OF DEATH/AGE AT DEATH: 14 June 1926, Chateau de Beaufresne, near Paris, France. Aged 82.
DISCIPLINE: Painter.
FIELD: Art
LANGUAGE: English.
PARENTS: Father: Robert S Cassatt (banker)
Mother: Katharine Kelso Johnston.
SIBLINGS: 3 brothers, Alexander, Robbie and Gardner, 1 sister, Lydia. The eldest brother, Alexander, became President of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company.
SPOUSE: None.
CHILDREN: None.
EDUCATION: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1861-64.
MAJOR WORK: “The Bath”.
LIFE AND TIMES:
In 1861, Cassatt started attending the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. During her time at the Academy, she regularly attempted to persuade her banker father that her future lay in painting. Finally he agreed and in 1868, accompanied by her mother, she moved back to Paris, where she had originally acquired her taste for art.
In 1868, Cassatt achieved her first success, when her painting “The Mandolin Player” was accepted for the Paris Salon's annual exhibition.
In 1870, Cassatt returned temporarily to the United States, to escape the Franco-Prussian war, but as soon as Europe was safe, she came back, in 1871, this time to Parma, Italy, where she studied under Carlo Raimondi, learning the techniques of intaglio, incised carving, which she used later when she took up etching in Paris. During this period, she had another painting accepted by the Paris Salon, titled ‘On the Balcony’.
In 1872, Cassatt went to Seville and Madrid to look at the work of Rubens and Velasquez and, being impressed by Rubens, she then went to Antwerp investigate his work in greater detail. From there, she sent a painting to the Paris Salon which she'd done of the head of Mme Cortier (Maxwell Galleries, San Francisco) entitled “Ida”. When Degas* went to the Salon in 1873, he saw it and said "That is true. There is someone who feels as I do".
Back in Paris, in April 1874, Cassatt probably visited the first exhibition of Impressionist art, hung by Renoir and held in the studio of Nadar, the photographer and including work by Degas. By 1875 she was painting in the style of the Impressionists In 1877, Cassatt finally met Degas, who went to her studio and invited her to join the Impressionists. In the same year, Cassatt’s parents and her sister, Lydia, decide came to live permanently in Paris. In the late 1870s her work began to show her break from the academic tradition of the Paris Salon and also demonstrated the influence of Degas and others in: “Woman Reading” and “Little Girl in a Blue Armchair,” both painted in 1878. The latter is only Cassatt painting known to have been worked on by Degas.
Degas influence clearly showed in her use of pastels. Both she and Degas enjoyed the medium, for freedom of stroke and also because it was possible to build up colour with it. Both of them began to use fixative so they could keep the layers of colour pure and get an intense effect. This has made their pastels last better than those who didn’t know or use the same technique.
In the early 1880s Cassatt did her best Impressionist paintings, including “La Loge” and “Woman and Child Driving”. These works demonstrate Degas’ influence in the way that the figures are positioned and the unusual technique of cutting off parts of the overall composition at the edge of the canvas. Cassat’s change of style could best be seen in 1882, in a portrait of her mother called “Reading le Figaro”, which was said to have great psychological intensity. At this time, she painted “Mother About to Wash her Sleepy Child,” her first use of the mother-and-child theme.
She herself modelled for Degas for work he was doing for the eighth Impressionist exhibition of 1886 at which a great sensation was caused by the work of Seurat and other pointillists. At the Ecole des Beaux-Arts In April 1890, there was a major exhibition of Japanese art which had a tremendous effect on Cassatt. That summer, she engaged a printer to help her develop her intaglio work and a year later, she exhibited ten colour prints at her first solo show.
She was now aged 46 and could have had a solo show before but she waited until she was quite ready.
The series of prints were considered by many to be her finest achievement, being not only an artistic, but also a technical tour de force. At about this time, a society of exclusively French printers and engravers exhibited their work, in a large gallery at Durand-Ruel's. Cassatt had exhibited with many of them in group exhibitions before, but now they excluded her simply because she was American. Cassatt found this to be unacceptable and she, together with fellow artist Pissarro*, held individual exhibitions in smaller adjacent rooms at the same time as the French exhibition.
In 1892, Cassatt bought a country home, Chateau de Beaufresne, a 17th century manor house, and at the same time set about trying to achieve recognition from the American public, which had hitherto been cool towards her work. She was now at the height of her creative powers, as can be seen in “The Bath”, painted 1891-1892, and in 1893, she had a comprehensive individual show in Paris, in which she exhibited 98 works which were very well received.
By 1900, Cassatt started to develop cataracts and her style became coarser. As a result, she gave up printing. She had a nervous breakdown in 1911, after her brother, Gardner, died after collapsing when she and his family were on a visit to Egypt, and then, in 1914, she abandoned painting altogether. In 1914: she evacuated her home at Chateau de Beaufresne because it was in the war zone and she moved to Grasse, in the south of France. Just before war began, she had attended the funeral of Degas. She returned to Beaufresne when the war ended in 1918 and died there.
ASSESSMENT: Regarded very highly in France, by contemporary critics and other artists.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS:
Cassatt traveled to Chicago to try her luck, but lost some of her early paintings in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
Degas was forthright in his views, as was Cassatt.[51] They clashed over the Dreyfus affair (early in her career she had executed a portrait of the art collector Moyse Dreyfus, a relative of the court-martialled lieutenant at the center of the affair.
1893 Columbian World Exposition , a large painting by Mary Cassatt, Modern Woman, one of two extensive murals in the Woman's Building.
ONELINER: Mary Cassat, American Impressionist painter
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Roudebush, Jay; Mary Cassatt; Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1979