Who Was Mary Cassatt and Why Was She So Important?

Mandolin Player, 1868

Born into a wealthy family in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, Cassatt (1844–1926) traveled through Europe at a young age before studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Students at the academy learned to paint by copying from Old Masters, and Cassatt’s early work followed the model set out for her there.

After her studies, she returned to Europe and eventually settled in Paris, where she produced Mandolin Player (1868), which was accepted to the fine arts Salon of 1868. Painted in a realist style with a dark background and softly modeled highlights, the work is reminiscent of 17th-century Dutch character studies. But we also see Cassatt’s attention to female interiority in the sensitivity with which she rendered the woman’s gaze, a theme that would recur across the arc of her career.

Offering the Panal to the Bullfighter, 1873

Cassatt left Paris with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and after spending some time back in the United States, she found herself in Madrid in 1872. Her affinity for the place and its art was immediately evident; as she described it, “I really feel as if it was intended I should be a Spaniard & quite a mistake that I was born in America.” She turned her attention to artists including Velázquez and Murillo, and her own painting took on the darker palette, strong contrasts, and bravura brushwork characteristic of those Spaniards’ art.

In Offering the Panal to the Bullfighter (1873) she reproduced a typically Spanish exchange, as a woman flirtatiously provides a bullfighter a glass of water into which he dunks a bit of honeycomb (panal). Cassatt’s brush seems to delight in the ornate embellishments of the figures’ clothing, confidently suggesting the texture of lace, the gleam of silver, the fineness of embroidery, and the rich sheen of silk. Cassatt expertly rendered not only the material but also the psychological dimensions of the scene, carefully calibrating the pose of the woman’s arm and the slight tilt of her head in a dynamic response to the boastful posture and intrigued expression of the man.

Woman in a Loge, 1878–79

By 1874—the year of the first Impressionist exhibition—Cassatt was back in Paris, accompanied by her sister Lydia. The two took advantage of Paris’s many delights, including the opera. Lydia was often the model for Cassatt’s paintings, and Woman in a Loge (1878–79) may indeed be a portrait of Lydia dressed for a glamorous evening at the Opéra Garnier.

Yet this work was also an experiment in a new mode of painting that might better capture the vibrant spectacle of modern Paris: Woman in a Loge was one of the first works Cassatt exhibited with the Impressionists. The placement of large mirrors at the back of the opera’s loges allowed her to play with the flickering effects of light from the opera’s gas-flame chandelier. The dazzling array of highlights across the surface of the image communicates how it might have felt to experience what novelist Émile Zola described as “a rain of light from the ceiling to the floor.” When this work was shown at the 1879 Impressionist exhibition, Cassatt had it framed in green, creating a sharp contrast with the red of the opera seats and the soft pink of the woman’s dress, an exuberant optical effect.

In the Loge, 1877–78

In the Loge (1877–78) is a clever meditation on the dynamics of female agency in modern Paris. The movement of middle-class women through the city was highly constricted, especially if they wanted to appear “respectable,” but they were allowed to attend theater matinees on their own. The high-collared dress the figure wears—a contrast to the shimmering décolletage of Woman in a Loge—suggests this is an afternoon viewing.

The principal subject actively looks through opera glasses, forthrightly asserting her presence in the scene. As the noted feminist scholar Griselda Pollock describes it, the figure’s “own consciousness is powerfully asserted in pictorial terms by her colouristic dominance and her structurally decisive pose.” She is nevertheless subject to the male gaze: In the background of the painting, a male operagoer directs his lenses conspicuously at our protagonist. Cassatt constantly grappled with the limitations imposed on women, often making social constraints the very subject of her work.

Woman Reading, 1878–79

One of the most remarkable transformations in 19th-century art was a shift away from grandiose subject matter toward scenes of everyday life. If male Impressionists typically turned their gaze to the street, the café, or the cabaret, Cassatt looked primarily toward the domestic interior. Rather than see this as limiting, one can view it as disclosing an otherwise unseen world, what Pollock terms “spaces of femininity.”

The woman shown in Woman Reading (1878–79) is in a “morning dress,” a simple garment reserved for private domestic activities. Her attire and the casualness of the pose, turned away from the viewer, make this an especially intimate view of a woman’s lived experience. Here we also see Cassatt’s experiments in color theory, as she allows the white of the woman’s dress to pick up the colors of her surroundings, especially the strong green of the chair. Cassatt’s loose brushwork further emphasizes her burgeoning affinity with the Impressionists.

Children in a Garden (The Nurse), 1878

Cassatt had no children of her own, but she represented them frequently. The 19th-century novelist and critic Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote approvingly of this aspect of Cassatt’s work, saying that “only a woman can paint infancy. There is a special feeling that a man cannot achieve.” While a limiting characterization of essentialized gender roles, Huysman’s remark also acknowledges Cassatt’s particular sensitivity and skill in depicting children.

In Children in a Garden (The Nurse) (1878), an infant in a carriage sleeps soundly while a young boy plays and a nurse knits alongside them. In this work, one of the first she painted out of doors, Cassatt captured the strong shadows of midday as she studied the light falling across this private garden. Despite being set outside, the scene communicates a sense of quiet enclosure as the rich border of green and the edges of the flower-lined garden path gently draw our focus to the baby at the center of the painting. This level of domestic bliss was available only to the very wealthy, which Cassatt certainly was, but she also alludes to the shared labor of raising children in her considered depiction of the nurse.

Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly, 1880

In the 1880s, and especially following the death of her sister Lydia from Bright’s disease in 1882, Cassatt turned increasingly toward domestic subjects. In Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly (1880), we see a portrait of her sister, ailing but still actively at work crocheting; Cassatt’s female subjects are rarely at rest. As in Children in a Garden, Cassatt rendered the outdoor scene as a private, contained space. Lydia is posed against a garden border, which both bolsters her and connects her to the house a short distance away. Despite being at home, Lydia is fashionably dressed in a long, fitted garment with tartan plaid and lace accents. Her large white hat dazzles in the afternoon sun, affording Cassatt another opportunity to study the interaction of light and color. While Cassatt’s brushwork is loose and sketchy in many areas of the composition, she rendered Lydia’s face with delicate care.

Under the Lamp, 1882

In the spring of 1879, Cassatt began work in printmaking alongside Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, and Félix Bracquemond. They planned to publish their prints in a collaborative journal to be titled Le Jour et la Nuit. The journal was never realized, but Cassatt’s interest in print continued. She explored many of the same themes she addressed in her painting, layering techniques of etching, aquatint, and drypoint to create richly textured images. She made at least 80 black-and-white prints between 1878 and 1883; later in her career she would revive her interest in the technique.

One of the things Le Jour et la Nuit (“day and night”) was grappling with, according to art scholar Holly Clayson, was how day and night were becoming increasingly intertwined with the advent of electric lighting, which many found unpleasantly harsh. None other than Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: “In Paris . . . a new sort of urban star now shines out nightly, horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare!” Typically, Cassatt addressed this issue in a domestic setting. Under the Lamp (1882)features a glowing orb that both facilitates the women’s activities and divides them into discrete areas, transforming the scene into one of intense contrasts. Clayson argues that the lamp is a stand-in for debates around illumination in Paris, showing Cassatt once again using the subject matter available to her to engage fully with her time.

Young Woman in a Black and Green Bonnet, Looking Down, c. 1890

Cassatt had a particularly close friendship with the Impressionist Edgar Degas, who encouraged her to turn to pastels. She adopted the medium around 1880 and quickly developed a range of techniques that allowed her to achieve both a rapid, spontaneous quality and a nuanced depth of tone. In Young Woman in a Black and Green Bonnet, Looking Down (c. 1890), the patterns of the chair and the woman’s dress have an especially sketchy aspect, echoed in the energetic lines of the background. But the figure’s face is delicately modeled, subtly incorporating blue and green tones to offset her pinky glow. Cassatt stumped and blended the pastel surface to create a velvety texture that is especially effective in conveying the softness of skin. The image is at once casual and intimate, fashionably of its time and enduring in the familiar feeling of catching a moment to oneself.

Louisine Havemeyer and Her Daughter Electra, 1895

In addition to pursuing her own art practice, Cassatt helped her friend Louisine Havemeyer assemble a remarkable collection of contemporary painting. Louisine described Cassatt as having “the ‘flair’ of an old hunter” in her collecting, and Cassatt guided her and her husband toward a prescient collection of both living French artists and some of Cassatt’s Spanish favorites, including Goya and El Greco. The Havemeyers were among the first American collectors of Degas, Pissarro, and Monet; many of the works Cassatt helped select are now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 1895 the Havemeyers traveled through Europe and commissioned Cassatt to make this double portrait of Louisine and her daughter Electra. Cassatt marshaled many of the hallmarks of her style in this pastel, including an emphasis on loose, energized gestures, layered and contrasting colors, attention to the detail and texture of fashionable clothing, an intimate domestic setting, and the maternal bond.

The Letter, 1890–91 and Woman Bathing, 1890–91

Like many artists in 19th-century Paris, Cassatt was hugely inspired by the Japanese art arriving in the city thanks to new trade agreements. In 1890 the École des Beaux-Arts held a large-scale exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints, showcasing the flat patterning, vibrant color, and vertical perspective characteristic of ukiyo-e. After seeing the show, Cassatt wrote to her friend and fellow Impressionist Berthe Morisot, “Seriously, you must not miss that. You who want to make color prints, you couldn’t dream of anything more beautiful. I dream of it myself and don’t think of anything else but color on copper. . . . P.S. You must see the Japanese—come as soon as you can.”

Cassatt’s “color on copper” prints translated the style of the woodcuts into drypoint and aquatint plates. While her earlier, black-and-white prints were tonal and atmospheric, these images are devoid of shadows, instead focusing on large, flat blocks of color and compressed spatial arrangements. In The Letter, Cassatt emphasized the planar qualities of the image through the decorative patterning of the wallpaper and the woman’s dress. Woman Bathing similarly includes a floral carpet whose flat pattern creates a vertically confining space rather than a receding perspective. Cassatt engaged some of the same color relationships she explored in her paintings, notably in the contrasting pink and green stripes of the bathing woman’s garment. In these works, Cassatt created scenes of both intimacy and refusal, allowing viewers into the women’s private spheres but denying them access to the contents of the letter or the face of the bather (despite the presence of a mirror).

Modern Woman Mural, 1893

In 1893 Cassatt was commissioned to create a 14-by-58-foot mural for the Women’s Building at the important Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The mural fittingly showed women at work, picking fruit from a tree and passing it down to young girls. Turning Eve’s apple on its head, Cassatt showed women’s work as a form of intergenerational cooperation and knowledge exchange (limited, however, to white women). Cassatt was a suffragist, encouraging women to have a voice and recruiting her friend Louisine Havemeyer to help support the cause.

Cassatt’s “modern woman” wore the fashionable garden dresses of her day, garnering some criticism from those involved with dress reform who sought to liberate women from corsets, girdles, and many-layered clothing. Cassatt, however, did not feel that femininity was at odds with her feminist principles. As she wrote of the mural, “If I have not been absolutely feminine, then I have failed.”

Mother and Child, 1890

Later in her career, Cassatt dedicated herself almost exclusively to scenes of mothers and children—a point of contention for those who would like to claim her as a radical feminist, rejecting societal norms and expectations. Yet Cassatt treated motherhood without saccharine sentimentality, and the scene in Mother and Child (1890) is as much about women’s daily lives as it is about motherly love. The art historian Anne Higonnett points out that Cassatt “offers a validation of the roles which women, for whatever reason, have played.” Capturing a moment of tender connection near the center of the image, Cassatt dissolved much of what is extraneous about the setting into her own vigorous brushwork.

Moving between the enduring and the experimental as she navigated the contours of life in modern Paris, Cassatt gives us rare insight into what it meant to be a working woman artist.