Mary Cassatt was an American artist who worked in Paris during the late 1800s. Before getting into her life, it's worth mentioning an art historian named Linda Nochlin. In 1971, Nochlin wrote an article called Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? She argued that the main reason women weren’t widely recognized in art history wasn’t because they lacked talent, but because they were often blocked from accessing the training and institutions that helped artists build careers. This included art schools, exhibitions, and professional networks mostly controlled by men.
That doesn’t mean talented women weren’t making art. Artists like Sofonisba Anguissola, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun created skilled and well-known work, even though they often had to find different ways to train or promote themselves. Still, the larger art world often didn’t include them, which is probably why fewer of their names have become widely known.
Mary Cassatt is one example of a woman who did manage to build a recognized career in art. She was born in Pennsylvania to a wealthy family—her father was a banker from Pittsburgh. When she was a child, her family spent about five years living in Europe. After returning to the U.S., she studied art privately and later enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. At age 22, in 1866, she returned to Europe to continue her studies with painters there.
While living in Paris, she became part of the avant-garde art scene and developed a close friendship with Edgar Degas. He was a key influence on her, and their artistic styles share some similarities, especially in how they used pastel. Like Degas, Cassatt applied short, layered strokes of bright colors, letting the viewer’s eye blend them—a method known as optical mixing. She also used non-local color, which means adding unexpected hues like purples or blues to skin tones or shadows, rather than just painting them in realistic tones.
Cassatt is best known for her scenes of women and children, which were common subjects in her work. Even though she never married or had children, a lot of her art focuses on motherhood. In that way, her work connects to earlier artists like Angelica Kauffman, who painted scenes about women’s roles in society. But Cassatt’s scenes tend to feel more like real moments—less staged and more like quick glimpses into everyday life.
One of the interesting things about Cassatt’s work is how she mixes technique with subject. For example, she might show a mother holding a child, but instead of making everything look polished or idealized, she focuses on texture, color, and light. These choices link her closely with the Impressionists, a group of artists who painted scenes of modern life with loose brushwork and attention to changing light.
Some people argue that Cassatt was a better draftsperson than many of the other Impressionists. Whether or not that’s true, it’s clear she had a strong grasp of anatomy and form. Her figures feel solid and natural, and her ability to capture the human body in motion or in stillness shows real skill.
Mary Cassatt’s paintings from late 19th-century Paris share some features with the work of Edgar Degas, especially in how both artists captured scenes related to entertainment and public life. They often focused on people at the opera or ballet, which had become major parts of Parisian culture after Baron Haussmann’s redesign of the city. Cassatt and Degas were interested in the act of looking, both from the audience and among the crowd itself.
In Cassatt’s painting on the right, a woman is shown holding a pair of opera glasses. This detail connects to Degas’s At the Ballet, where a woman in the foreground also holds opera glasses with a tense grip. Behind the main figure in Cassatt’s painting, there’s a man leaning over a balcony using opera glasses to look at her. That kind of interaction—where someone is watching someone else who might also be watching—shows a layered way of looking that was common in Paris at the time, especially in public venues like the opera. These moments tie into the idea of spectacle, where being seen and watching others were both part of the experience.
This also connects to a larger idea called the male gaze. The term refers to how women are often shown in art and media from a male point of view—usually as objects to be looked at. Even though Cassatt painted from a woman’s perspective, she was still working in a world shaped by male expectations and audiences. Her work had to fit into the social norms of the time, even as she brought a different perspective to it.
Another painting that brings up the idea of the male gaze is Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. In that work, a man is shown watching a performance through opera glasses, and a woman stands at the bar with a neutral or distant look on her face. Her reflection in the mirror behind her shows her interacting with the man, but it’s unclear what she’s thinking. The setup places the viewer in the position of the man, reinforcing the act of looking and being looked at. That kind of interaction shows up in many Impressionist works, where women appear as performers, dancers, or people in the crowd who are still on display in some way.
During this time, for a woman to succeed as a public figure in the arts—whether as a singer, dancer, or actress—she often had to meet certain expectations about appearance. Beauty was part of the public image that helped women become well known. Cassatt was aware of this, and even if her paintings were more focused on women’s private lives, like motherhood or quiet moments, they still interacted with the broader culture of looking and performance in 19th-century Paris.
Mary Cassatt’s The Bath (1882) and Edgar Degas’s Morning Bath (c.1883) both focus on bathing scenes, but they handle the subject differently. Both artists were influenced by formal elements like non-local color—where colors don’t match reality—and flattened space, which reduces depth and makes everything feel closer to the surface of the picture. These elements can also be seen in ukiyo-e, a style of Japanese woodblock printing that both artists were aware of. In Cassatt’s work, the stripes on the clothing and rug patterns help flatten the space and pull attention to texture and surface, rather than depth.
Printed fabrics and patterned wallpaper were widely available in the 19th century due to new industrial techniques. Artists like Manet, and later Matisse, often included these decorative elements. In Cassatt’s painting, there’s also this interest in surface detail, especially in how she handles the striped gown, the rug, and the basin.
Degas’s Morning Bath, on the left, shows a nude figure stepping into a tub. The focus is on the curve of the back and the dim, indoor lighting. The scene feels private, and the setting looks like a bedroom. Cassatt’s painting, on the other hand, shows a clothed woman helping a child bathe in a white basin. The woman’s arm supports the child, who rests one hand on the edge of the bowl. The scene shows physical care and isn’t posed for display. It focuses on daily activity and interaction, rather than showing the body in a way that might suggest voyeurism.
A story that’s been passed around—though it doesn’t have a confirmed source—is that Degas once joked with Cassatt at a party, asking her when she would stop painting “Virgin Marys and their Christ-like children.” If true, this story reflects how scenes of women and children were sometimes dismissed as overly sentimental by male artists at the time. But in this painting, Cassatt doesn’t show the moment as romantic or overly emotional. The figures are focused on what they’re doing, and the painting doesn’t try to dramatize the action.
Some historians have tried to link Cassatt and Degas romantically, but there’s no real evidence they were in a relationship. They worked together, had similar interests in technique and subject matter, and were both unmarried. There’s also speculation that both might have been asexual, though that can’t be confirmed either. What’s clearer is that they respected each other’s work and exchanged ideas about form, composition, and subject.
There’s a story people sometimes tell about Mary Cassatt in her later years, though it should be fact-checked if you plan to use it in a research paper because it is most likely apocryphal. The story goes that by the time she was in her seventies, after years of painting en plein air (which means painting outdoors), she developed serious cataracts and was nearly blind. Claude Monet had a similar problem late in life. One day, a friend visited Cassatt and brought her young child along. The child sat next to Cassatt, and she gently touched the child’s face and said something like, “I wish I could see your face one more time so I could paint you.” Whether or not the story is true, it shows how deeply connected she was to the subjects she spent so much of her life painting.
Cassatt often focused on the everyday lives of women, especially moments that involved caregiving, domestic routines, and communication. One example of this is her print of a woman writing a letter. Scenes like this have a long history in art. Johannes Vermeer, for example, painted several women reading or writing letters in quiet interiors. In literature too, writing letters was an important way women were represented as connecting with others—Dangerous Liaisons, written in the 18th century, is a well-known novel told entirely through letters. Love letters and personal correspondence have been important themes in both literature and visual art.
In the print being discussed, Cassatt uses strong, precise drawing. It also shows influence from ukiyo-e prints from Japan, especially in the way the image flattens space and emphasizes patterns. These Japanese prints had a big influence on many 19th-century European artists. In this print, for example, the striped fabric and surface patterns play a big role in the composition. There’s also a desk with a slanted top that might look distorted at first glance, but it’s actually shaped like a real trapezoidal writing desk used during that period.
Cassatt made this work using etching and aquatint, two forms of printmaking we’ve looked at before—like in the works of William Hogarth, Albrecht Dürer, and Francisco Goya. Goya also used aquatint for soft shading, and later Honoré Daumier worked with lithography. The process Cassatt used was especially difficult because she had to line up the different printing plates precisely. Her prints weren’t just black and white—she also worked with color, which meant using multiple plates and extra steps in the printing process. Making a colored aquatint required a lot of trial and error, and the results had to be carefully controlled. These works often took just as much time and skill as oil paintings.
Another print by Cassatt carries the same focus on mothers and children, especially the way a mother might hold or touch a child in everyday moments. This kind of physical closeness shows up in many of her works, often through small gestures like an arm wrapped around a child or a hand gently supporting them.
No comments:
Post a Comment