Mary Cassatt 1845-1926

Sale: Hotel Drouot, Paris, March 1901, lot 63
Durand-Ruel, Paris, France (acquired at the above sale)
Mrs. Montgomery Sears, Boston, Massachusetts (acquired from the above)
Mrs. J.D. Cameron Bradley (her daughter)
M. Knoedler & Co., New York (acquired from the above)
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1952

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Mary Cassatt and Philadelphia, February-April 1985, no. 31, p. 76, illustrated in color

Good Housekeeping, February 1910, pp. 141, 144
Adelyn Dohme Breeskin, Mary Cassatt: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oils, Pastels, Watercolors, and Drawings, Washington, D.C., 1970, no. 443, p. 173, illustrated

In 1877 at the invitation of her friend Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt became the only American artist to join the French Impressionist group in Paris.  Cassatt particularly admired Degas’ work in pastel and his constructive criticism and continual efforts to introduce her to new techniques had a lasting effect on Cassatt’s mature style.  She wrote to her friend Louisine Havemeyer around 1915, “How well I remember nearly forty years ago seeing for the first time Degas’s pastels in the window of a picture dealer in the Boulevard Haussman.   I would go there and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his art.  It changed my life.  I saw art then as I wanted to see it” (Louisine. W. Havemeyer, Sixteen to Sixty, New York, 1961, p. 275).  Like Degas, Cassatt became increasingly obsessed with the pastel medium and by the 1890s it had become her primary means of expression.  Pastel allowed Cassatt to demonstrate her accomplished draftsmanship while displaying a rich layering of color and tone.

Around 1900, Cassatt began working on a series of vibrantly colored pastels depicting elaborately dressed young girls in big hats against simple interior backgrounds.  Nancy Mowll Mathews notes, “In the course of revising her approach to the mother and child theme, Cassatt embarked on a series of pastels, drawings and dry points of children that preoccupied her for the rest of her working career.  She had painted children many times before but there had always been an obvious incentive, either a portrait commission or contact with her young nieces and nephews.  This series seems to have had no such motivation.  Cassatt’s nieces were now older than her preferred child models, who appear to be five or six years old” (Mary Cassatt, New York, 1987, p. 125).

In Head of Simone in a Large Plumed Hat, Looking Left, Cassatt demonstrates her solid command of the pastel medium, employing opulent hues of blue and green to frame the soft pink of the flesh.  Simone, a child from Mesnil-Théribus, the village near Cassatt’s summer home, Beaufresne, outside of Paris, was one of Cassatt’s favored models after 1900.  Ms. Mathews writes, “Of all Cassatt’s works, these images of children have the greatest popular appeal.  They combine a number of the winning qualities of young girls--soft, satiny skin, ‘pretty’ features, guileless expressions, charmingly awkward poses, and the frilliness of their clothes.  Any surfeit of sweetness is counteracted by the masterly handling of every aspect.  Lighter and simpler than the mother and child compositions of this period, the pastels of children are without detailed backgrounds and are thus more directly engaging” (Mary Cassatt, p. 127).