Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt is an inspiring and expressive impressionist who was very important to western art. She was a woman of respectable social stature who chose to study art rather then the expected marriage then motherhood. Because she was one of few female artists in Europe at the time it wasn’t easy for her and she often had limitation as to what she was allowed to paint. This is how she came to the conclusion that she would paint mothers with their children. This subject in a way became her signature. 

Although these painting of mothers may seem happy and cheerful some seem to have almost a hidden meaning to them. A good example of this is her painting titled The Boating Party. The picture portrays a young woman holding a toddler on her lap on a boat. Both the mother and the child are looking at the man rowing the boat, but he seems to be focused on his rowing, although we can’t see his face so he may be acknowledging the passenger’s gazes. The bright and cheerful colors suggest that it is midday and sunny in the south of France, but the psychological atmosphere makes us question what really is going on. How do the people in the boat know each other and where are they going? What has just occurred or what is about to occur.

Cassatt is able to obtain this questioning quality in her work by using space and pattern. The mother and the child’s eyes can be connected with the boatman’s face to form a “V”. The way the sail is cut-off in the corner makes it look like a snapshot making the painting seem flat or one-dimensional.

Mary’s love of flat patterns and one-dimensional space links her work to the art of Asia’s specifically the Japanese print, which has fascinated western artists sense they opened trade with Japan in 1854. 

This Japanese influence is evident in her painting Mother’s Kiss. You can see this in her drawn out contours and the fattening effect of pattern. Mary was a big fan of the famous Japanese printmaker, Kitagawa Utamaro. His print of a woman and two children uses the same flattening pattern and contour styles as Cassatt’s work.  One biography said, “The Boating Party a few years away echoes these ideas in paint and connects Mary to the Post-Impressionist movement and artists like Gauguin, whose planes of color took on symbolic meanings of their own” (Mary Cassatt).

When in Paris she became very close friends with the artist Edgar Degas who was also an impressionist. In 1879 he asked her to join the impressionist group in their fourth annual exhibition. 

Mary Cassatt defied the odds of women of her time, by attending Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and by going to study in Paris although her parents did not agree with this. She even beca­­me active in the women’s rights movements. In 1915 she helped to organize an exhibitions in New York that featured the work of old masters, including her friend Degas and herself to raise money to support the cause.

Bibliography:

Bio.com. A&E Networks Television, n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2014.

"Mary Cassatt: A Woman of Independent Mind | EDSITEment." Mary Cassatt: A Woman 

of Independent Mind | EDSITEment. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Nov. 2014.