Mary Cassatt - "Little Girl in Blue Armchair"

Introduction

Mary Stevenson Cassatt was born on 22nd May 1844 in what is now modern Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She was an American print maker and painter who spent much of her life France (Cassatt, 2001, p 15-18). She received her early art education from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from the year 1860 to 1862, and in 1865 went to Paris to take private art lessons from the famous academic painter, Jean-Léon Gérôme, and later on became a "copyist" for the Louvre museum (Cassatt, 1998, p 90-92). Her early work titled "The Mandolin Player" was initially displayed by the Paris Salon. However, after three years of diligent and brilliant work, Cassatt shifted back to Philadelphia for a while due to the Franco Prussian War in 1870 (Cassatt, 2001, p 15-18).

France During the “The Long Nineteenth Century”

The Impressionist movement grew in France, led by the authoritarian regime of Napoleon III, whose cultural policies in France focused entirely on the size of the Empire, most of which were hostile in the nineteenth century. The advent of the Second Empire (1852-70) marked a break in the artistic history of the nineteenth century in France, creating a divide between the official art and the independent art (Nord, 2000, p 20-50). The cultural policies of the Empire inspired academic art which was primarily represented by Meissonier, Cabanel and Bouguereau, who were showered with honors by the regime along with the head of the Academy of Fine Arts. This divide in the choice and trend of art was the top layering on various underlying issues in France, like political, as most realists and naturalists were Republicans and opponents of the regime of Napoleon III. The sociological newcomers were from underprivileged backgrounds and were not in any way linked to the ruling aristocracy. The geographical scope of France led many independent thinkers to seek preserved sites of the industrial revolution, like Barbizon and Normandy (Nord, 2000, p 20-50).

Mary Cassatt and the "Impressionists"

In the year 1877, Edgar Degas invited Cassatt to connect with a group of free artists, who would later on come to be known as the famous "Impressionists." For a long time, Cassatt was the only American associated with this group, and her work was shown in many of their historical exhibitions (Cassatt, 1998, p 90-92). Mary Cassatt's technique and composition was greatly influenced by the Impressionists ideology and individual artists, especially in her use of color and light. Her chief critic and mentor was Degas, who provided advice on technique and encouraged her to carry on her work with printmaking (Cassatt, 2001, p 15-18).

All of her paintings reflect her main area of interest, which were figure compositions. In early years, the subjects of her works were her family, the opera, and the theater. Shortly after, she starting focusing her attention towards the mother and child subject, which was also treated with warmth and a naturalness in her pastels, prints and paintings (Cassatt, 2001, p 15-18).

Cassatt developed a role for ...