Mary Cassatt: A Woman of Independent Mind
Picturing America
- 14 A Mary Cassatt The
Boating Party
Find out about the inspirational struggle of America's first great woman fine artist.
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I am independent! I can live alone and I love to work.
—Mary Cassatt
In an age when women were expected to tend to marriage, motherhood, and domestic matters, few Americans—especially those who occupied the upper-middle class—could have imagined that a young woman of respectable social stature would insist on setting out to study art professionally in Europe, let alone achieve fame and the respect of some of the most progressive artists of the late nineteenth century. Yet, throughout her life as well as in her art, Mary Cassatt, the daughter of a Pennsylvania banker, showed tenacity and a strong will in place of the so-called "retiring, feminine" virtues extolled in the Victorian era.
1. Biography
 Mary
Stevenson Cassatt, whose Boating
Party (1893– 1894) is a featured work in the Picturing America portfolio,
was born on May 22, 1844, in a section of what is now Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The family later moved to Philadelphia, and over her father’s objection,
she began her studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1861 at the
age of sixteen. (When told by his daughter that she wanted become a professional
artist, Mr. Cassatt is reputed to have replied, “I’d rather see
you dead first.”).
 Mary was soon disillusioned by the slow pace of study and the restrictions of women art students in the Academy, however: particularly as they pertained to the all-important life-studies classes, which required drawing nude models. She persuaded her parents to let her study abroad, instead. Linguistically and culturally, Mary was well-equipped to travel in Europe. Between 1851 and 1855, she had resided there with her family and was fluent in both French and German. When she arrived on the Continent for a four-year stay at age twenty-two, she was barred from attending the all-male École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, but was accepted as a private pupil by some of the leading academic painters of the day, such as Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824 - 1904), who also taught at the École and who tutored fellow-American painter Thomas Eakins (1844 - 1916).
Eakins, unlike Cassatt, developed an objective and probing realistic style,
never journeyed abroad again, and devoted himself exclusively to recording American
subjects. (See Eakins’s John
Biglin in a Single Skull, c. 1873, in the Picturing America Teachers
Resource Book). She, on the other hand, was destined to actively participate
in a seismic shift in the French art world that challenged the government-sponsored
salon: the Impressionist movement. Accompanied by her sister Lydia, she moved
her residence to Paris in 1874, and her parents joined her three years later.
She eventually acquired a property northwest of Paris, the Château de
Beaufresne, purchased with money she had earned as a successful artist. Mary
recognized that she had found a more accepting work environment abroad. As she
later commented to Chicago patron Bertha Palmer in response to the latter’s
offer of a commission for the Women’s Building at the Chicago
World’s Fair, “Speak to me of France. Women do not have to fight
for recognition here if they do serious work.” That perception may
have had a great deal to do with her class as well her close family connections
and her association with Edgar Degas (1834 - 1917). Nonetheless, she became active in the women’s
suffrage movement in the United States. In 1915, she helped to organize
a New York exhibition consisting of works by old masters, her friend Degas,
and herself in order to raise funds to support the cause. Five years later,
she witnessed the passage of the nineteenth amendment, which gave American women
the right to vote. Mary Cassatt died at her home in France in 1926.
2. The Artist
 Like
John Singer Sargent (1856 - 1925), another extremely gifted expatriate American
artist who found his subject matter on both sides of the Atlantic (see
his work in the Picturing America Resource Book), Mary Cassatt preferred
to apply a loose brushstroke, which resulted in style more painterly than Eakins's
descriptive manner or Gérôme’s
attenuated, realistic style. Her early work comprises genre scenes, and
these subjects, such as the Mandolin Player of 1872 (Private Collection), had
success at the Paris Salon—considered at the time the most important venue
for artists. However, Cassatt's artistic ambitions, seasoned by the more experimental
masters of nineteenth-century Realism such as Gustave
Courbet (1819 - 1877), carried her, unlike Sargent, into the circle of French
avant-garde artists of the late sixties, seventies and eighties. She was becoming
dissatisfied with the conventional French painting of the salon and with the
treatment of women artists in the contemporary art world. In 1875 Mary saw pastels
(pictures created with sticks of color composed from pure pigment and a binding
medium) by Edgar Degas, who worked with the Impressionists, in
an art dealer's window and became fascinated by what she saw. "I saw art then
as I wanted to see it," she said. In 1879 she was asked by him to join the Impressionist
group in their fourth annual exhibition. By that time Mary and Degas had become
friends and colleagues. "No woman has a right to draw like that," Cassatt recalled
him as once saying. One of Degas' representations of her, an etching, shows
Mary as a trim, sternly attired figure seen from the back and resting on
a man's umbrella as she engages in studying an Etruscan sarcophagus in the Louvre.
Degas has shown her as a commanding woman with a stance that reveals a not-so-hidden
desire to push the boundaries of her art.
 In
spite of the greater sense of professional respect accorded women artists abroad,
their professional opportunities were quite restricted in comparison to those
of their male counterparts—even for women who occupied Cassatt's social
level. Although Impressionism stressed the observation and capture of contemporary
life, women of Mary's class did not appear at the cafés and outdoor venues where
male Impressionist artists found many of their subjects, nor would it have been
proper for her to paint a portrait of any man outside of her immediate family
circle. Her world was dominated by the feminine—the domestic sphere or
anywhere woman played a major role beyond the unwelcome gaze of strangers. In
this context, Mary's treatment of her subjects becomes very significant, particularly
the one that occupied her interest from the 1880s onward: mothers and their
children.
3. Mother and Child
The
Boating Party (see the image, above), in the Picturing America portfolio,
was painted when Cassatt was already well known for variations on the theme
of mother and child. No particular religious content—such as the Madonna
and Child—should be attributed to Mary's depictions of this theme, even
though Renaissance paintings with this subject were sometimes on the artists'
mind. The emphasis for Mary is rather on an important role women fulfilled in
contemporary society. The woman represented in The Boating Party is
of indeterminate social status. (Mary often used local women of modest means
and their children and dressed them in appropriate costume.) The young woman
holds a toddler somewhat awkwardly on her lap, while both look at the boatman
who seems immersed in his rowing (although, because he is seen from the back,
we cannot be sure that he is oblivious to their gaze). The colors are cheerful,
suggesting, perhaps, the bright midday sun of the south of France, where this
image was created. The psychological atmosphere, on the other hand, is one of
silent intensity. We find ourselves asking: What is the relationship among these
people? Where are they going? What (if anything) has just occurred?
One way the artist has obtained such a powerful, questioning response in the viewer is by the use of space and pattern. The broad, almost unmodeled expanses of blues, whites, and yellows flatten the space of the painting and visually draw the people together into a tight unit. The woman's and child's gazes are directed at the boatman's face—we can even connect the three pairs of eyes by drawing a "V", the two-thirds of one of the most stable geometric units in art, the triangle. The boatman, dressed in deep blue, and the sail on the left, cut-off, as in a snapshot, are also flattened in space. We understand them as pattern with strong contours (outlines), and therefore as having a one-dimensional quality.
4. Print-Making and Japan
 The
love of flat pattern, which upsets our Western assumption of three-dimensional
space, and the interest in contour link Mary Cassatt not only to Degas but to
the arts of Asia—specifically the Japanese
print, which had been intriguing Western artists since the opening of trade
with Japan in 1854. After the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886, Mary began
to turn more of her effort in the direction of printmaking. Her first solo print
exhibition occurred in 1891, the year in which Mother's Kiss was created.
The influence of Japanese prints is evident here in the deftly drawn contours
and flattening effect of pattern; but just as noteworth is the emotional affinity
Mary Cassatt had with one of the most famous of Japanese printmakers, Kitagawa
Utamaro (1754 - 1806). His print
of a woman and two children, for example, shows the delight in artistic
devices of pattern and contour as well as an affectionate, mundane manner of
interaction that artists like Mary, who had worked with the Impressionists,
would have understood and favored. The Boating Party a few years away echoes
these ideas in paint and connects Mary to the Post-Impressionist movement and
artists like Gauguin, whose planes of color took on symbolic meanings of their own.
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