Most people know Mary Cassatt for her pictures of children, yet many of those children had no tie to the women holding them. She came to that subject late, after the toreros of Seville and the theater boxes of Paris, and for much of that road her sharpest critic and closest ally was Edgar Degas.
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From Seville to the Nursery
Around 1890, Cassatt turned more and more to children and to the women who cared for them. Her affection for her nieces and nephews fed the theme, and so did a period that argued a great deal about how children should be brought up. The sitters were often hired models, posed as families they were not.
Before that subject, she had painted Spanish scenes for the Salon, then the life of Paris as the only American officially part of the Impressionist group, which she joined because Degas invited her. The twelve paintings below cover the whole road, from 1873 to 1900, in order of fame, with the most celebrated last.
Two threads tie them together. Degas returns again and again, as adviser, critic and partner in a trade, and in the 1890s Japanese prints change the way she builds a picture.
12. Girl Arranging Her Hair (1886)
Against wallpaper in pink, red and mauve, a girl in a loose white chemise sits on a low sofa, elbows raised, twisting her long hair behind her neck. Her lips are slightly parted. She looks at no one, and no one in the picture looks at her.
Cassatt painted Girl Arranging Her Hair in 1886, at forty-two. That year the Impressionists held their eighth exhibition, which proved to be their final one, and Cassatt, who had shown with them since 1879, entered this canvas under the plainest title she could find: Etude, French for study.
The plain title hid an old subject. Male painters had long shown women at their toilette, and the scene was usually arranged to be watched. Cassatt kept the gesture and removed the watcher, so that the girl seems to be enjoying a moment that belongs to her alone.
Degas, the leading figure of the group and the man who had brought her into it, noticed more than anyone. When the exhibition closed, the two painters swapped works. He gave her one of his pastels of a woman bathing in a shallow tub, precisely the kind of scene Cassatt had just turned inside out, and he took this canvas.
Degas could be harsh about her work. This canvas, though, never left him. When his studio was sold in Paris in 1918, a year after his death, it was still among his own works, where he had kept it for over thirty years.
At a Glance
Artist: Mary Cassatt (1844 to 1926)
Painted: 1886
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 75.1 x 62.5 cm (29 9/16 x 24 5/8 in)
Where to see it: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
11. Lady at the Tea Table (1883 to 1885)
An old woman sits bolt upright behind a tea table, dressed in black under a white lace cap, her fingers resting on a blue and gold teapot. She is Mary Dickinson Riddle, a first cousin of the painter's mother, and the porcelain was a present her daughter had given the Cassatts. Lady at the Tea Table was painted to say thank you. The family refused it.