Mary Stevenson Cassatt, American, 1844 - 1926
Madame and Her Maid/ Madame et sa femme de chambre, circa 1893-97
Pastel on paper
20 1/4 by 29 in., 51.4 by 73.7 cm
Private collection
The carefully defined representation of the figures’ faces in Madame and Her Maid contrasts with the expressive application of pigment Cassatt uses in the background of the composition. This latter technique imbues the work with an air of immediacy and spontaneity that suggests it was conceived from direct observation. More on this painting
Mary Stevenson Cassatt (1844–1926), born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, spent her early years with her family in France and Germany. From 1860 to 1862, she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. By 1865, she had convinced her parents to let her study in Paris, where she took private lessons from leading academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, copied works of the old masters, and went sketching. She stayed in Courance and Écouen and studied with Édouard Frère and Paul Soyer. In 1868, Cassatt’s painting The Mandolin Player (See below) was accepted at the Paris Salon, the first time her work was represented there. After three-and-a-half years in France, the Franco-Prussian War interrupted Cassatt’s studies and she returned to Philadelphia in the late summer of 1870.
Mary Stevenson Cassatt, American, 1844 - 1926
A Mandoline Player, c. 1868
Oil on canvas
91.44 x 73.66 cm
Private Collection
This work pre-dates Cassatt’s exposure to Impressionism and is in more of the Romanticism style. Were it not for the signature, it could have easily been painted 100 years earlier. If you look Cassatt’s body of work, this is one of only a scant few pieces that has the dark brown background and overall heavy feel of the more traditional style of painting that she would later denounce. More on this painting
A Mandoline Player depicts a young girl playing the mandolin (mandoline is apparently the French spelling for this instrument). She’s wearing white, red and blue – interestingly enough the national colors of Cassatt’s native United States and her adopted country of France.
Mary Stevenson Cassatt, American, 1844 - 1926
Summertime, c. 1894
Oil on canvas
Height: 73.7 cm (29 in); Width: 96.5 cm (37.9 in)
Hammer Museum
Cassatt returned to Europe in 1871. She spent eight months in Parma, Italy, in 1872, studying the paintings of Correggio and Parmigianino and working with the advice of Carlo Raimondi, head of the department of engraving at the Parma Academy.
Mary Stevenson Cassatt, American, 1844 - 1926
Offering the Panel to the Bullfighter, c. 1873
Oil on canvas
39 5/8 x 33 1/2 in. (100.6 x 85.1 cm)
Clark Art Institute
“Offering the Panel to the Bullfighter” by Mary Cassatt depicts a young woman flirtatiously offering a glass of water to a bullfighter, who dips panal (honeycomb) into it to make an energizing drink.
Cassatt made several paintings of local Spanish subjects during her stay in Spain in 1873. The vibrant colors and brushwork were inspired by Diego Velázquez, whose artworks, Cassatt studied during her travels to Madrid and Seville.
The Bullfighter costume is depicted with the decorations and elaborateness of a torero’s outfit that the Spanish call the “suit of lights.” The flamboyant matador costume is part of the drama of a bullfight, which is considered performance art. More on this painting
In 1873, she visited Spain, Belgium, and Holland to study and copy the works of Velázquez, Rubens, and Hals. In June 1874, Cassatt settled in Paris, where she began to show regularly in the Salons, and where her parents and sister Lydia joined her in 1877. That same year, Edgar Degas invited her to join the group of independent artists later known as the Impressionists. The only American officially associated with the group, Cassatt exhibited in four of their eight exhibitions, in 1879, 1880, 1881, and 1886.
Mary Stevenson Cassatt, American, 1844 - 1926
The Mandolin Player, c.1872Oil on canvas
91.44 x 73.66 cm
Private collection
Mary Stevenson Cassatt, American, 1844 - 1926
Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge, c. 1879
Oil on canvas
Height: 813.31 mm (32.02 ″); Width: 597.41 mm (23.52 ″)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
“Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge” by Mary Cassatt is one of a series of theater scenes in Paris created by Cassatt in the late 1870s.
This work shows a woman, assumed to be her sister Lydia seated in front of a mirror with the balconies of the Paris Opéra House reflected behind her.
This painting demonstrates the influence of Edgar Degas, one of her close friends, particularly in the depiction of the effects of the lighting. Cassatt and Degas had a long period of collaboration. More on this painting
Mary Stevenson Cassatt, American, 1844 - 1926
YOUNG WOMAN WEARING A RUFF, circa 1869
Oil on canvas
32 by 25 inches, (18.2 by 63.5 cm)
Private collection
Mary Stevenson Cassatt, American, 1844 - 1926
Young woman in a Black and Green Bonnet, Looking Down, circa 1890
Pastel on tan wove paper
Height: 52 cm (20.4 in); Width: 65 cm (25.5 in)
Princeton University Art Museum
Under their influence, Cassatt revised her technique, composition, and use of color and light, manifesting her admiration for the works of the French avant-garde, especially Degas and Manet. Degas, her chief mentor, provided criticism of her work, offered advice on technique, and encouraged her experiments in printmaking.
Mary Stevenson Cassatt, American, 1844 - 1926
Femme nue allongée
Oil on cardboard
32.2 x 45.8 cm
Private collection
Like Degas, she was chiefly interested in figure compositions. During the late 1870s and early 1880s, the subjects of her works were her family (especially her sister Lydia), the theater, and the opera. Later she made a specialty of the mother and child theme, which she treated with warmth and naturalness in paintings, pastels, and prints.
Mary Cassatt became well known for her paintings that depict women and children in domestic settings. Children in a Garden (The Nurse) is the first major Impressionist canvas of the outdoors that she painted, and it is one of her early masterworks. She included it in the eighth Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1886, and in her first major U.S. solo exhibition in 1895. More on this painting
Little Girl in a Blue Armchair stands as a testament to the newly formed relationship between Mary Cassatt and the impressionists, and to her assimilation of a freer style of painting. With a limited palette and vibrant brushstroke, she created a dynamic interplay of forms that is echoed in this captured moment between rest and play.
Mary Stevenson Cassatt, American, 1844 - 1926
Children in a Garden (The Nurse), c. 1878
Oil on canvas
Height: 654.05 mm (25.75 in); Width: 809.75 mm (31.87 in)
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Mary Stevenson Cassatt, American, 1844 - 1926
Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, c. 1878
Oil on canvas
89.5 x 129.8 cm (35 1/4 x 51 1/8 in.)
The National Gallery of Art
Cassatt reworked the painting with the help of her friend Edgar Degas and exhibited it along with 10 other paintings in her debut exhibition with the impressionists in 1879. More on this painting
Mary Stevenson Cassatt, American, 1844 - 1926
Mère et enfant
Pastel on paper
53,5 x 64,5 cm
Private collection
Mary Stevenson Cassatt, American, 1844 - 1926
Picking flowers in a field, c. 1875
Oil on panel
Height: 26.6 cm (10.4 in); Width: 34.3 cm (13.5 in)
Private collection
Mary Stevenson Cassatt, American, 1844 - 1926
A Woman and a Girl Driving, c. 1881
Oil on canvas
Height: 897.64 mm (35.34 in); Width: 1,306.07 mm (51.42 in)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Mary Cassatt’s flair for digging into an ordinary moment and distilling its emotions stands out in this portrayal of three individuals lulled by a carriage ride into silent reverie. Once titled simply Driving, the painting depicts an outing in the Bois de Boulogne, a large wooded park on the western edge of Paris. The driver of the carriage is Lydia Cassatt, sister of the artist, and the girl seated primly beside her is Odile Fèvre, niece of the painter Edgar Degas. The bored-looking groom is unidentified. More on this painting
Mary Stevenson Cassatt, American, 1844 - 1926
The Child's Bath, c. 1893
Oil on canvas
Height: 1,003 mm (39.48 in); Width: 661 mm (26.02 in)
Art Institute of Chicago
“The Child’s Bath,” with its striking and unorthodox composition, is one of Cassatt’s masterworks. In it she employed unconventional devices such as cropped forms, bold patterns and outlines, and a flattened perspective, all of which derived from her study of Japanese woodblock prints. The lively patterns play off one another and serve to accentuate the nakedness of the child, whose vulnerable white legs are as straight as the lines of the woman’s striped dress. More on this painting
Cassatt’s role as an advisor to art collectors benefited many public and private collections in the United States. From her early days in Paris, she encouraged the collection of old masters and the French avant-garde. In 1901, she accompanied Mr. and Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer on a collecting trip in Italy and Spain. Cassatt had known Mrs. Havemeyer before her marriage. In 1873, she had encouraged the then seventeen-year-old Louisine Elder to buy a pastel by Degas, and the two women became close friends. Cassatt was eventually instrumental in shaping the Havemeyer collection, most of which is now in the Metropolitan Museum.
Failing eyesight severely curtailed Cassatt’s work after 1900. She gave up printmaking in 1901, and in 1904 stopped painting. She spent most of the war years in Grasse and died in 1926 at her country home, Château de Beaufresne, at Le Mesnil-Théribus, Oise. More on Mary Stevenson Cassatt
Mary Stevenson Cassatt, American, 1844 - 1926
TWO SISTERS, 1896
Pastel on paper
14 3/4 by 21 in., (37.5 by 53.3 cm)
Private collection
Two Sisters is one of two pastels executed in 1896 which features the same two unidentified sisters in an intimate moment. Cassatt’s pastels of the 1890s focused largely on scenes of mothers and children but “friendship was [also] celebrated many times in Cassatt’s work of this period. From the drypoint of two young girls pouring over a document on the table to the pastel called The Conversation (See below), or Two Sisters, these works have the same psychological intimacy as her depictions of mother and child. Poses and gestures that bespeak taking comfort from the presence of another are natural in both themes. In an age when female subject matter was favored, this was an attractive motif since it showed not one but two fashionably dressed women” (Nancy Mowll Mathews). The fully opened fan, an elegant and colorful element favored by the Impressionists, adds a decorative splash to this composition of two obviously stylish sisters. More on this painting
Mary Stevenson Cassatt, American, 1844 - 1926
The Conversation, 1896
Pastel on paper
Private collection
Mary Stevenson Cassatt, American, 1844 - 1926
Young Women Picking Fruit, c. 1891
Oil on canvas
51 3/4 × 35 1/2 × 1 in131.44 × 90.17 × 2.54 cm
Carnegie Museum of Art
Degas reportedly said upon viewing Cassatt’s Young Women Picking Fruit (1891) (See above). She took the thinly veiled insult in stride, and the two maintained a close friendship based on a shared respect for asymmetrical composition and classical Japanese prints. Cassatt supported herself as a successful portrait artist and printmaker, having declared herself unfit for marriage or motherhood. More on this painting
Mary Stevenson Cassatt, American, 1844 - 1926
The Boating Party, c. 1893/1894
Oil on canvas
90 x 117.3 cm (35 7/16 x 46 3/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art
After 1893, Cassatt began to spend many summers on the Mediterranean coast at Antibes. Under its intense sun, she began to experiment with harder, more decorative color. Here, citron and blue carve strong arcs that divide the picture into assertive, almost abstract, shapes. This picture, with its bold geometry and decorative patterning of the surface, positions Cassatt with such post–impressionist painters as Gauguin and Van Gogh
This painting, one of her most ambitious, was the centerpiece of Cassatt's first solo exhibition in the United States in 1895. Her contacts with wealthy friends in the United States did much to bring avant–garde French painting into this country. More on this painting
Failing eyesight severely curtailed Cassatt’s work after 1900. She gave up printmaking in 1901, and in 1904 stopped painting. She spent most of the war years in Grasse and died in 1926 at her country home, Château de Beaufresne, at Le Mesnil-Théribus, Oise. More on Mary Stevenson Cassatt
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