Category Archives: Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt’s Original Pastel Boxes Acquired by the National Gallery of Art on View from September 11 through October 5

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These pastel boxes originally owned by Mary Cassatt were acquired recently by the National Gallery of Art. Click here for a closer look.

Six years before Cassatt died she gave these boxes of chalk pastels to Electra Webb Bostwick, the 10-year-old granddaughter of her New York friend and patron Louisine Havemeyer. Click here for a closer look.

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Pastel boxes originally owned by Mary Cassatt and recently acquired by the Art Materials Collection and Study Center at the National Gallery of Art.

Washington, DC—The National Gallery of Art has recently acquired three original pastel boxes that were owned by Mary Cassatt. They will go on public view for a limited time only in conjunction with Degas/Cassatt, the immensely popular exhibition that has drawn more than 300,000 visitors to date.

Both the exhibition and display of pastels will end on October 5, an occasion marked with the public symposium Degas and Cassatt: Different Perspectives from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. in the West Building Lecture Hall.

Mary Cassatt most likely began working in pastel around 1878. She exhibited three pastels in her debut at the 1879 impressionist exhibition, including At the Theater (1878/1879), which is currently on display in the exhibition. Her interest in the medium reflects her enthusiasm for exploring alternative to oil paints and by the 1890s, pastel eclipsed oil as her preferred medium.

Presumably in 1920, Cassatt gave these boxes of pastels to ten-year-old Electra Webb Bostwick, the granddaughter of Louisine Havemeyer, an art collector and dear friend of the artist. Years later, Bostwick recalled, “Not realizing the value of the pastels I wasted lots of them on playing and swapping them with my friends.”

Donated to the Shelburne Craft School in Vermont in the early 1940s, these boxes were brought to the attention of the Gallery by conservators at the Shelburne Musmeum.   As a result, the pastel boxes have recently been acquired by the Gallery’s Art Materials Collection and Study Center, a permanent home for artists’ materials, technical information, and trade literature. Having Mary Cassatt’s actual art supplies will enable Gallery conservators and art historians to further their analysis and understanding of the artist’s process, and of the materials themselves.

http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/press/2014/cassatt-pastel-boxes.html

In her last decades, Cassatt was using pastels more than oil paints. Her luminous colors were vibrant — beautiful fuchsias and teals. In 1920 — six years before she died — Cassatt gave these boxes of chalk pastels to the 10-year-old granddaughter of her New York friend and patron Louisine Havemeyer. Years later, that granddaughter, Electra Webb Bostwick , admitted she didn’t know just how special the gift was.

“Not realizing the value of the pastels I wasted lots of them on playing and swapping them with my friends,” she recalled.

Now they belong to the National Gallery’s collection of artists’ materials — paints, brushes and other artifacts, useful to scholars and other artists who study them for inspiration and edification. They’ll be on view until Oct. 5.

http://www.npr.org/2014/09/23/350650986/now-thats-an-artifact-see-mary-cassatts-pastels-at-the-national-gallery

Mary Cassatt Biography

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The Loge – Gallery 75

Cassatt, Mary
American, 1844 – 1926

BIOGRAPHY

Known for her perceptive depictions of women and children, Mary Cassatt was one of the few American artists active in the nineteenth-century French avant-garde. Born to a prominent Pittsburgh family, she traveled extensively through Europe with her parents and siblings. Between 1860 and 1864 she attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. At the age of twenty-two Cassatt went abroad, studying old master paintings in European museums. In Paris, she studied with prominent academic painters and independently at the Louvre. She went back to the United States for a short period, then returned to Europe in 1871, spending her time painting and copying the old masters in museums in Italy, Spain, and Belgium.

In 1874 she settled permanently in Paris. Although she had several works accepted for exhibition by the tradition-bound French Salon, her artistic aims aligned her with the avant-garde painters of the time. In 1877 Edgar Degas invited her to join the progressive group of artists popularly known as the impressionists. She particularly admired the work of Degas, and a close working relationship developed between the two artists. They both came from similar upper-class backgrounds, and their friendship was based on common visual sensibilities, including an interest in bold compositional structure, the asymmetry and high vantage point of Japanese prints, and contemporary subject matter.

During her long residence in France, Cassatt sent paintings back to exhibitions in the United States–hers were among the first impressionist works seen in this country. By advising wealthy American patrons on acquisitions, she also played a crucial role in forming some of the most important collections of impressionist art in America.

[This is an excerpt from the interactive companion to the videodisc American Art from the National Gallery of Art.]

http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/artist-info.1107.html?artobj_artistId=1107&pageNumber=1

Little Girl In A Blue Armchair – Cassatt

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Little Girl In a Blue Armchair

In Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, Mary Cassatt demonstrates her powers of observation in showing her young subject sprawled in a large, blue armchair. The smartly dressed little girl fidgets; in the next chair is her sleeping dog. The girl’s pose has the naturalism of childhood that would later characterize many of Cassatt’s paintings of children.

Pictorial structure and clarity are the foundation of Cassatt’s art. Under Edgar Degas’ tutelage, she began to collect and study Japanese prints; their patterns and asymmetric designs greatly influenced her work. Here she placed the girl, the focus of the composition, off-center. The armchairs form a pattern encircling an oddly shaped patch of gray floor in the middle of the picture. As in Japanese art, the forms are tilted up, and the edge of the canvas crops the image.

Cassatt’s strong colors and energetic brushwork mark her connection with the French impressionists. In style and subject matter, her art is close to that of Degas and Edouard Manet. Degas, in fact, made suggestions about the composition of this painting and reworked parts of its background.

In Cassatt’s pictures, light does not dissolve form. Instead, objects retain their mass and coherence with light enhancing their physical presence.

Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878, oil on canvas, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon

Images and Text Credit:  www.nga.gov

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Degas/Cassatt Exhibit at NGA Through October 5, 2014

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Introduction

From the moment the American Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) made her debut in 1879 with the group of artists known as the impressionists, her name has been linked with that of the Frenchman Edgar Degas (1834–1917). Cassatt stated that her first encounter with Degas’s art “changed my life,” while Degas, upon seeing Cassatt’s art for the first time, reputedly remarked, “there is someone who feels as I do.” It was this shared sensibility as much as Cassatt’s extraordinary talent that drew Degas’s attention.

The affinity between the two artists is undeniable. Both were realists who drew their inspiration from the human figure and the depiction of modern life, while they eschewed landscape almost entirely.
 Both were highly educated, known for their intelligence and wit, and from well-to-do banking families. They were peers, moving in the same social and intellectual circles. Cassatt, who had settled in Paris in 1874, first met Degas in 1877 when he invited her to participate with the impressionists at their next exhibition. Over the next decade, the two artists engaged in an intense dialogue, turning to each other for advice and challenging each other to experiment with materials and techniques. Both made printmaking an important aspect of their careers and for a time collaborated on their endeavors. Their admiration and support for each other endured long after their art began to head in different directions: Degas continued to acquire Cassatt’s work, while she promoted his to collectors back in the United States. They remained devoted friends for forty years, until Degas’s death.degas_revised

Infrared reflectogram composite with Cassatt’s original demarcation (solid line), Degas’s alteration (broken line), and the dog’s alternative placement (circle)

“Little Girl in a Blue Armchair”: A Closer Look

In a letter to the French art dealer Ambroise Vollard, Cassatt wrote that Degas not only advised her as she painted Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, but even worked on the background. Recent
 cleaning, restoration, and technical
 analysis have been instrumental in 
identifying Degas’s role. The paint
 surface in the corner of the room
 beyond the furniture shows evidence
 of having been scraped or rubbed, a 
technique used often by Degas but 
only rarely by Cassatt. Infrared imaging,
 moreover, reveals that Cassatt had initially used a horizontal line to mark the edge of the floor and a single back wall that was parallel to the picture plane. Degas made the space more dynamic by adding the corner, creating a junction of two walls and thus introducing a diagonal that expanded the room spatially. The use of such wide angle diagonals to define interior architecture was common in Degas’s work, but unprecedented in Cassatt’s.

To accommodate the new corner, Cassatt had to adjust her composition. She repositioned the armless couch in the background to align with the now sloping wall. She also reconsidered the placement of the dog. While it now rests comfortably on a chair, the infrared image indicates that she had tried placing it on the floor, seated in front of the couch. Eventually, she painted it out there and set it back on the chair.

Mary Cassatt at the Louvre

DEX19

 Degas’s own planned contribution for the failed journal Le Jour et la nuit was the etching now known asMary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Etruscan Gallery. Cassatt once remarked that she posed for Degas “only once in a while when he finds the movement difficult and the model cannot seem to get his idea.” Yet the theme of Cassatt strolling through the Louvre clearly fascinated him, resulting in a rich body of work produced in a range of media over a number of years. Encompassing two prints, at least five drawings, a half-dozen pastels, and two paintings, the series marks one of Degas’s most intense and sustained meditations upon a single motif.

 DEX72

Beyond 1886

The final impressionist exhibition in 1886 marked a turning point in Degas and Cassatt’s relationship. Although their friendship endured until his death, their interactions noticeably diminished as they began to move in different directions. Cassatt focused increasingly on depictions of mothers and children. The once energetic brushwork of her earlier impressionist paintings gave way to greater precision, and she developed a proclivity for bold colors and elaborate patterns. Degas’s art underwent a radical stylistic transformation as well. His compositions became increasingly simplified, his colors more vibrant, his paint handling broader and more expressive. He also devoted much of his energy to reworking earlier canvasses.

  Degas – Woman Viewed from Behind c. 1879 – 1885

Degas’s choice of the Louvre as the setting for this group of works spoke to the two friends’ mutual appreciation for art and its tradition. In the series, he depicted Cassatt as an elegantly dressed museum goer, wholly absorbed in her study of art. Nearby, a seated companion (usually identified as Cassatt’s sister Lydia) looks up from her guidebook. Cassatt, with her back turned fully to the viewer, balances against an umbrella in a pose that highlights the curve of her body and underscores her air of assurance. Although the precise relationship between the various works is not entirely certain, Degas most likely began with drawings and pastels of individual figures that served as references for the series as a whole. The more elaborate pastels and paintings of women visiting a museum culminate the series

The previous information is from:  http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/features/degas-cassatt.html