Mary Cassatt: A Woman's World by William H. Gerdts from Antiques & Fine Art magazine

Mary Cassatt: Prints and Drawings from the Collection of Ambroise Vollard at Adelson Galleries, New York, is the third exhibition of Cassatt works shown at the gallery in recent years. Like the 2000 and 2004 exhibitions, the present one continues the exploration of Cassatt's studio collection formerly owned by Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939), her French dealer, friend, and mentor during her later years. On show are prints and drawings, many relating to well-known examples in the artist's oeuvre, that reveal Cassatt's exploration of color and the impact that new graphic strategies, especially those from Japan, had on her.

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) was the first American artist to join the Impressionist movement in France. Born into a prosperous Pennsylvania family, she began her training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, an activity her father frowned upon, and later, traveled to Paris to study the Old Masters. Having toured and studied in Italy, Spain, and Belgium, she settled permanently in Paris in 1875, where she was joined by her mother and sister, Lydia, in 1877. That same year, one of her paintings was accepted into the Salon, and there she met Edgar Degas, who became her close friend and whose work influenced hers. At his invitation she participated in the 1879 Impressionist exhibition, and subsequently showed work at three more Impressionist exhibitions. Through her friendships with wealthy Americans such as Louisine and H. O. Havemeyer she encouraged the collecting of Impressionist works in

Cassatt is often criticized for failing to explore some of the more daring and innovative subject matter of her male counterparts the brothels and café concerts of Paris and their denizens and for failing to show an interest in the informal nude. But this is to misunderstand the nature of Cassatt's artistic vision and purpose. Through a combination of talent and ambition, Cassatt established herself as a successful equal to her male counterparts. And just as they had their favorite themes, Cassatt had hers, which for the most part reflected the domestic pleasures of upper-class women, a world that Cassatt herself was most familiar with and was free to explore in novel and experimental ways.

Cassatt herself was most familiar with and was free to explore in novel and experimental ways.
Cassatt never married and her closest and most enduring relationships were with her mother, her sister, Lydia, who also never married, and her brothers and their children. She depicted her mother a number of times. A Portrait of the Artist's Mother, circa 1889-1890, a soft-ground etching and aquatint, printed in brown ink, which reproduces in reverse her last portrait of her mother (private collection), is a moving image of the elderly and somewhat frail Mrs. Cassatt. In the soft-pencil drawing Lydia and her Mother at Tea, circa 1881, Cassatt's mother appears younger and more animated sitting alongside Cassatt's sister, Lydia, her favorite model until

Lydia's death in 1882. Here, Cassatt depicts the two individuals closest to her enjoying themselves in their closed 'women's space,' while also highlighting the rich silver tea set in the foreground. The work also bears a close resemblance to one of Cassatt's most famous oil paintings, The Tea, in which Lydia, is entertaining a younger and more style-conscious friend. In the drawing and etching, the identity of Mrs. Cassatt seems open to question because her features are partly concealed.

Cassatt undertook the subject of tea drinking again in Afternoon Tea Party [La Visite], a drypoint and aquatint, from her famous 1890-1891 series of ten color prints often referred to as The Ten. Her flat patterning of form and wiry linearism reflect the influence of an exhibition of Japanese works in Paris in 1890, while the exchange between the two women is far more animated than the muted scene of Lydia and her mother of a decade earlier. The strong linearism and contrast between the richly patterned robe and the nude upper torso of the figure in Woman Bathing [La Toilette], another drypoint and aquatint from The Ten, reflects the influence of Japanese art, while also acknowledging a debt to Degas's series of pastels and monotypes of bathers.

In Cassatt's later years, she became especially known for her renderings of mothers and children the first biography of Cassatt, written by Achille Segard, was entitled Un Peintre des Enfants et des Méres, Mary Cassatt (1913). This aspect of her work is brilliantly represented in The Barefooted Child, 1896-1897, one of Cassatt's last drypoint and aquatint prints. The severe frontality and symmetry of the group is ameliorated by the playfulness of the mother encouraging her infant in the game of patty-cake. This print is related to the artist's 1897 pastel Patty-Cake, now in the collection of the Denver Art Museum.