Yet though her subject matter was conventional, Cassatt was a master artists.
Mary Cassatt, Maternal Caress ( 1896 ). Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The French-American painting Mary Cassatt did not think much of Mother’s Day. She was more involved with women’s vote, an issue she firmly supported and often slipped into her drawings.
At a glance, perhaps this is amazing. Cassatt appears to be a champion of mothers, making her name associated with tender, close portraits of mothers and their children. It was this emphasis that saw her dismissed by 20th-century art historians as romantic, a painting of nothing more than “tea, clothes, and nursery”, as goes the infamous thorn from a 1954 assessment in Art News by Edgar P. Richardson. This view has n’t been helped by her paintings ‘ frequent use on holiday greeting cards.
Modern scholarship, however, is working to complicate the picture. Start, if you like, with biography. Cassatt’s parents, who were raised in an old-fashioned Philadelphia community, were generally opposed to her decision to pursue a profession in painting and firmly sisted that she make her own money from the beginning. In reply, Cassatt worked frenetically to build her name in an apparently female profession. Starting a home of her own, which she believed had deal her profession, was one sacrifice she made.
Mary Cassatt, The Child’s Bath ( 1893 ). Robert A. Waller Fund. Courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago.
Feeling constrained by American social mores, she crossed the Atlantic as a 22-year-old and did n’t look back. Just as she had been barred from joining in the École des Beaux-Arts upon arriving in Paris in 1866, but also Cassatt was prohibited from painting the Parisian flâneur who frequented the city’s streets, shops, and racing. ( Her predecessor, Rosa Bonheur, had resorted to cross-dressing. ) Cassatt did n’t seek out domestic scenes of mother’s child-rearing, rather, she painted what society allowed her to.
This raises a problem that still persists today: can it be lesbian to celebrate typically female subjects and work, or will only a ferocious rejection thereof suffice? In Cassatt’s situation, she went further than many of her forerunners by highlighting the adult work that was occurring at the local level. Works such as Mother Combing Child’s Hair ( 1879 ), Mother About to Wash Her Sleepy Child ( 1880 ), and The Child’s Bath ( 1893 ) are charming and intimate, but they are also about work. Add to this Cassatt’s personal expertise. The women she painted were generally models, which means, in essence, a working actor was painting a working model playing a working mom.
Mary Cassatt, Woman with a Sunflower ( 1905 ). Courtesy: National Gallery of Art.
And but there’s a more difficulty. Specifically, Cassatt’s clientele. The femme nouvelle ( the “new woman” ) burst into France in the late 1800s and vowed to alter the social order. Women now had greater saving power, access to education, and, as of 1884, a right to divorce. This new definition of womanhood made European upper-class women feel threatened, and it was largely for this category that Cassatt painted. All the same, unlike the 20th-century critics, her colleagues commented on her lack of sentiment and that she painted with strong power. ” No woman”, her companion Edgar Degas again said, “has a right to draw like that”.
Prior to a 2014 show that examined the connection between Degas and Cassatt, the National Gallery of Art’s director Kimberly Jones discovered Cassatt’s thoughts on Mother’s Day. According to Jones,” she was a steadfast admirer of female suffrage,”” she thought granting women the right to vote was a much more urgent matter.” Cassatt helped raise funds for the Woman Suffrage Campaign Fund by sponsoring an 1915 exhibition in New York and raising funds for the vote strategy.
Perhaps there would have been no enlightenment chords on the Madonna and Child narrative if Cassatt had been free to paint what she liked. And while Cassatt appeared to prioritize parenting over democracy, she did so at one point. Woman with a Sunflower ( 1905 ) depicts a mother balancing a child on her lap, her breast affixed with a large sunflower, the symbol of the suffrage movement.
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