Cassatt: Mothers and Children

By Judith A. Barter and Sue Roe

This monograph of American artist Mary Cassatt’s work celebrates fifty stunning portraits of mothers with their children in everyday life.

Mary Cassatt’s tender and profound paintings redefined portraiture and broke down barriers for women in art—both as artists and as subjects. This collection focuses on Cassatt’s insightful portrayal of women and children living their everyday lives. Fifty magnificent images cover the scope of Cassatt’s work, from her early interest in Japanese woodblocks all the way to her exploration of Modernist techniques. Two essays contextualize her as a pioneering female artist and as the American face of Impressionist painting.

• Captures the love between mothers and children

• A luminous, robust, and timely celebration of an artist with a unique legacy

Fans of The Private Lives of the Impressionists, In Montmartre, and Mary Cassatt: An American Impressionist in Paris will love this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781452169071

Book preview

MARY CASSATT: MATERNITY AND MODERNITY

Judith A. Barter

Field-McCormick Chair and Curator Emerita of American Art

The Art Institute of Chicago

Mary Cassatt, along with James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent, was one of the most important expatriate American artists of the nineteenth century. More remarkable still, despite being a foreigner and an unmarried woman, she was at the center of the Parisian avant-garde artistic circles of the 1870s, ’80s, and ’90s. Cassatt turned those perceived deficits into advantages. An intrepid traveler, she studied extensively in Italy, Spain, and France, facing obstacles with a tenacious spirit and a superior intellect. Standing five-and-a-half feet tall, with brown hair, gray eyes, a snub nose, a wide mouth and chin, and a ruddy complexion, she was not a beauty, as Edgar Degas’s portraits of her attest. But her electric vitality, described by her artist friend George Biddle, and the keen intelligence she possessed made her attractive to those who met her, and in her time, a talented modern artist.

Cassatt arrived in Paris accompanied by her sister Lydia in 1874, believing that Paris was the center of the art world and where she needed to be in order to make her living as a professional painter. The sisters experienced the nightlife of Paris, and Cassatt painted evenings at the opera and the parade of fashionable theatergoers. She embraced the spectacle of the modern world, and especially the qualities of light so favored by the Impressionists. In her opera pictures she included reflecting mirrors, ocular devices such as opera glasses, and chandeliers. Her pictures of reflections in mirrors predate Édouard Manet’s famous A Bar at the Folies-Bergère by several years.

She met Edgar Degas perhaps as early as 1875, and made her debut with the Impressionists in 1879 when her loge, or box, pictures