Cassatt. Nathalia Brodskaya

halia Brodskaïa

      Cassatt

      “I have touched with a sense of art some people – they felt the love and the life. Can you offer me anything to compare to that joy for an artist?”

Mary Cassatt

      © Parkstone Press International, New York, USA

      © Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA

      Biography

      Photograph of Mary Cassatt

      1844: Birth of Mary Stevenson Cassatt near Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. She is a daughter of a wealthy businessman. Before she is 10 years old, she visits numerous European capitals.

      1851: She lives with her parents in Paris, and the following year she lives in Berlin.

      1855: Her family goes back to the U. S. A

      1860–65: Mary Cassatt studies at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts despite her parents’ objections.

      1866: She goes back to Paris where she copies old masters in museums, especially in the Louvre. Jean-Léon Gérôme accepts her as a student.

      1868: She visits Barbizon and is very eager to study its style. Mandolin Player is accepted by the Salon jury

      1869: She is rejected by the Salon of Academic Art along with Cézanne, Monet and Sisley. Bazille, Degas, Pissarro and Renoir each have one work accepted.

      1871–72: She lives with her mother in Rome, as do many American artists at this time, and travels throughout Europe: Italy, Spain, France etc.

      1873–74: Creation of Salon des refusés. One of her paintings, Offering the Panal to the Bullfighter, is accepted by the Salon in Paris. She signs it “Mary Stevenson-Cassatt” using her middle name.

      1874: Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc. exhibition, which is the first Impressionism show, takes place in Nadar’s studio, 35 boulevard des Capucines. Cassatt, abroad, misses this event.

      1877: Degas invites her to exhibit with the Impressionists. She also advises Louisine Havemeyer in buying Degas and other impressionists’ paintings.

      1878: Cassatt and Pissarro have a consistent correspondence indicating that they have a long friendship and professional collaboration. Cassatt admires Pissarro’s work.

      1879: Her work hangs in the Impressionism show. She begins a long friendship with Berthe Morisot and is very close to Degas. The latter asks Cassatt, Pissarro and Bracquemond to contribute to Le Jour et la Nuit. She remains an active Impressionism member until 1886 and buys several impressionist paintings especially for her brother, Alexander.

      1882: Her sister Lydia dies.

      1886: Her style evolves and she no longer identifies herself with any movement.

      1890: She exhibits series of dry-points and aquatints and pastels in Durand-Ruel exhibition. She is strongly influenced by Japonese printmaking.

      1890–1900: She is very active as an adviser to numerous art collectors.

      1904: She receives the Légion d’Honneur for her contribution to the arts.

      1926: She dies blind near Paris at the age of 82 years.

* * *

      When she arrived in Paris in 1866, Mary Cassatt was twenty-two years old and she was one of many young Americans who had chosen to study in Paris. They arrived, painted in numerous Parisian academies and free studios, and met one another in the same “American” cafes, those little islands of homeland in foreign France where one spoke either English or terribly-accented French. After a while, they all returned home to become famous in their hometowns, or, at most, in their states. Mary, however, was the exception; she did not go back to America. Not only did she stay in France until the end of her life, but she also devoted herself to Impressionism in defiance of the contemporary artistic conventions.

      Bacchante

      1872

      Oil on canvas, 62 × 50.7 cm

      Museum of American Art of the Pennsylvania

      Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

      Even among Impressionists, however, she was considered “strange,” and she remained for them “a foreign impressionist”. Mary never painted a single landscape, although it was precisely in landscape that the genre had originated, matured, and was expressed most vividly. Cassatt limited her work to only one intimate genre – depictions of women and children. Nevertheless, she was devoted to Impressionism such as she saw it in the work of Degas, her friend and mentor. She considered it an honour to exhibit her work together with that of Monet, Degas, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, and Berthe Morisot.

      During Carnival

      1872

      Oil on canvas, 63.5 × 54.6 cm

      Private Collection

      Mary fitted into this group quite naturally. She was not afraid of Paris’s merciless, poisonous criticism, or the questionable privilege of being one of the rejects, even though before she joined the Impressionists her work had already been accepted by the Salon. She was incredibly gifted and unbelievably hardworking, and her French colleagues acknowledged this without fail. Mary Cassatt found her place among the best artists of her generation. She worked masterfully in oil and pastel, as well as the difficult and laborious graphic techniques. Her independence inspired respect. Only muchlater, however, at the end of the twentieth century, was it recognised that Cassatt had accomplished the goal of future generations of artists.

      Offering the Panal to the Bullfighter

      1872–73

      Oil on canvas, 100.6 × 85.1 cm

      Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

      In fact, she had become the first artist of the School of Paris, which was formed at the beginning of the twentieth century. When young artists from Russia, Italy, Poland, Spain and Mexico began flocking to Paris, when Russian and American collectors became the first to purchase the new, shocking works of art, and when the literature of future American writers of renown was being born in the cafés of Montmartre and Montparnasse, the life of the blind artist Mary Cassatt was coming to an end at Château de Beaufresne in Mesnil-Théribus (Oise).

      On a Balcony

      1873

      Oil on canvas, 101 × 54.6 cm

      Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

      The enigma of Mary Cassatt began at her very birth. Some biographers regard 1845 as the year of her birth, and her tombstone in Le Mesnil-Théribus indicates May 24th 1845. However, it is probably best to trust family archives and parish records, which record her birthday as May 22nd 1844. She was born in the United States, in Allegheny, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As she proudly told her biographer at the end of her life: “I am an American,” she said, “downright American… My mother is also an American, a daughter of Americans. Her family was of Scottish origin, who emigrated to America around 1700.

      Spanish Dancer Wearing a Lace Mantilla

      1873

      Oil on canvas, 65 × 49.5 cm

      The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D. C.

      Therefore our family has been established in