Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Miss Cassatt

Mary Cassatt
Denise at her Dressing Table
c. 1908-09
Metropolitan  Museum

Mary Cassatt
Young Girl at a Window
1883-84
National Gallery of Art (U.S.)

Miss Cassatt seemed inclined to talk and continued: "I doubt if you know the effort it is to paint! The concentration it requires, to compose your picture, the difficulty  of posing the models, of choosing the color scheme, of expressing the sentiment and telling your story! The trying and trying again and again and oh, the failures, when you have to begin all over again! The long months spent on effort after effort, making sketch after sketch. Oh, my dear! No one but those who have painted a picture know what it costs in time and strength!"  

Mary Cassatt
The Loge
c. 1878-80
National Gallery of Art (U.S.)

Mary Cassatt
The Cup of Tea
c. 1880-81
Metropolitan Museum

Mary Cassatt
Woman with a Fan
1878-79
National Gallery (U.S.)

Mary Cassatt
Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly
1880
Metropolitan Museum

Mary Cassatt
Ellen Mary Cassatt
c. 1899
pastel
Metropolitan Museum

Mary Cassatt
Nurse Reading to Little Girl
1895
pastel
Metropolitan Museum

Mary Cassatt
Woman with a Red Zinnia
1891
National Gallery of Art (U.S.)

Mary Cassatt
Little Girl in a Blue Armchair
1878
National Gallery of Art (U.S.)

Mary Cassatt
Lilacs in a Window
c. 1880-83
Metropolitan Museum

Mary Cassatt
Margot in an Orange Dress
1902
pastel
Metropolitan Museum

"She never allowed her photograph to be taken, and if anyone begged her for a snapshot she would quickly turn so that all the camera caught of her was the outline of her back or, at most, a little bit of profile. The only suggestion of a portrait that I know of her is a small picture that I bought before my marriage. It is in gouache and represents a lady in a bonnet with her gloved hands lying upon her lap. Miss Cassatt told me she was her own model for that picture and did it looking at herself in a mirror. The hands are very characteristic, and she wore the same bonnet when she posed for one of Degas's Modistes."  

- from Sixteen to Sixty, the memoirs of Louisine W. Havemeyer published in 1930. Mrs. Havemeyer was befriended as a teenager studying art in Paris in the 1870s by her fellow American, Mary Cassatt, ten years older and already established as a painter. They remained lifelong friends. The memoir reveals to what a great extent the famous Havemeyer art collection was shaped both directly and indirectly by the hand of Mary Cassatt.

With the exception of the painting below, the Cassatt works brought together here never belonged to Mrs. Havemeyer. She was not an extensive collector of her friend's work. The Cassatt pastels and paintings at the National Gallery in Washington DC and at the Metropolitan Museum were deposited by other donors.

Mary Cassatt
Self-portrait
1878
Metropolitan Museum
Acquired by Louisine Elder (later Havemeyer) in 1879

Edgar Degas
At the Milliner's
1862
pastel
Metropolitan Museum
Gift of Louisine Havemeyer