Mary Cassatt 1845-1926

Durand-Ruel, Paris, 1908
Durand-Ruel, New York, by 1909
M. Knoedler & Co., New York
Private Collection, North Carolina (acquired from the above; sold: Sotheby's, New York, December 3, 1998, lot 24, illustrated in color on the cover)
Acquired by the present owner at the above sale

Paris, Durand-Ruel, Tableaux et pastels par Mary Cassatt, 1908, no. 21 (as Enfants jouant avec un chat)
Boston, Massachusetts, St. Botolph Club, Pictures by Mary Cassatt, 1909, no. 2 (as Enfants jouant avec un chat)
New York, National Academy of Design, 84th Annual Exhibition, 1909, no. 192
Buffalo, New York, Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Albright Art Gallery; St. Louis, Missouri, St. Louis City Art Museum, 4th Annual Exhibition of Selected Paintings by American Artists, 1909, no. 30
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 105th Annual Exhibition, no. 682
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carnegie Institute, 10th Annual Exhibition, 1910, no. 41, illustrated
Chicago, Illinois, Art Institute of Chicago, Annual Exhibition of American Paintings & Sculpture, 1910, no. 41, illustrated
New York, Durand-Ruel, 1911
Washington, D.C., Corcoran Gallery of Art, 4th Exhibition of Oil Paintings, 1912-13, no. 103
Cincinnati, Ohio, Cincinnati Art Museum, 22nd Annual Exhibition of American Art, 1915, no. 122
New York, Durand-Ruel, Paintings by Mary Cassatt, 1917, no. 19 (as Enfants jouant avec un chat)
St. Louis, Missouri, St. Louis City Art Museum, 17th Annual Exhibition of Paintings by American Artists, 1922, no. 23
New York, Durand-Ruel, Paintings, Pastels, Drypoints and Watercolors by Mary Cassatt, 1923, no. 7 (as Enfants jouant avec un chat)
Washington, D.C., Corcoran Gallery of Art, 10th Exhibition of Contemporary American Oil Paintings, 1926, no. 125 (as Enfants jouant avec un chat)
New York, Durand-Ruel, Paintings and Pastels by Mary Cassatt, 1926, no. 16 (as Enfants jouant avec un chat)
Chicago, Illinois, Art Institute of Chicago, Memorial Collection of the Works of Mary Cassatt, 1926-27, no. 2
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Museum of Art, Mary Cassatt Memorial Exhibition, 1927, no. 4
New York, Durand-Ruel, Paintings by Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, 1930, no. 5 (as Enfants jouant avec un chat)
Buffalo, New York, Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Albright Art Gallery, 25th Anniversary of the Opening of the Albright Gallery: A Group of French Paintings from Courbet down to and including the Contemporary Moderns, 1930, no. 10 (as Enfants jouant avec un chat)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, McClees Galleries, 1931, no. 15 (as Enfants jouant avec un chat)
Brooklyn, New York, The Brooklyn Museum, Paintings by American Impressionists and Other Artists of the Period "1880-1900," 1932, no. 13
New York, College Art Association, American Paintings: Memorial Exhibition, Since 1900, 1932-33, no. 15
St. Louis, Missouri, St. Louis City Art Museum, Oils and Pastels by Mary Cassatt, 1935, no. 6
New York, Milch Galleries, Important Exhibition of 19th and 20th Century American Painters, 1936, no. 5
Dallas, Texas, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Texas Centennial Exposition, 1936, no. 16, illustrated
Brooklyn, New York, The Brooklyn Museum, Leaders of American Impressionism: Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, John H. Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, 1937, no. 30 (as Enfants jouant avec un chat)
Baltimore, Maryland, Baltimore Museum of Art, Mary Cassatt, 1941-42, no. 54
Palm Beach, Florida, Society of the Four Arts, French Impressionist Paintings, 1947, no. 1, illustrated (as Enfants jouant avec un chat)
New York, M. Knoedler & Co., Summer Exhibition, 1965, no. 11 (as Mother and Two Children)
New York, M. Knoedler & Co., The Paintings of Mary Cassatt, 1966, no. 41, illustrated in color on the cover (as Mère et enfants jouant avec un chat)
Tokyo, Japan, Isetan Museum of Art; Nara, Japan, Prefectural Museum of Art, The Art of Mary Cassatt, 1981, no. 44, illustrated

Fine Arts Journal, vol. 23, July 1910, p. 15, illustrated
Craftsman, vol. 19, March 1911, p. 543, illustrated
Bulletin of Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts, Syracuse, New York, October 1911, illustrated (as Happy Children and Cat)
Achille Segard, Mary Cassatt: Peintre des Mères et des Enfants, Paris, 1913, illustrated facing p. 128
Art Digest, vol. 16, December 12, 1942, p. 8, illustrated
Margaret Breuning, Mary Cassatt, New York, 1944, p. 40, illustrated
Adelyn Dohme Breeskin, Mary Cassatt: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oils, Pastels, Watercolors and Drawings, Washington, D.C., 1970, no. 505, p. 189, illustrated
Nancy Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt, New York, 1987, no. 121, p. 137, illustrated in color
Nancy Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt: A Life, New York, 1994, p. 285, illustrated

Children Playing with a Cat exhibits the gentle warmth and familial tenderness characteristic of Mary Cassatt's most successful mother and child paintings, and is one of a series of major works in which the artist depicts a mother with more than one child. Beginning in 1905, Cassatt experimented with the three-figure composition when she created two tondo murals for a competition to decorate the new Statehouse in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, close to her childhood home in Lancaster County. One of these tondos, Mother and Two Children (figure 1), is the inspiration for the present painting.  In it Cassatt creates natural, yet physically compressed figures, so that they conform to the tondo shape by taking up as little space as possible. After selling the tondo to her friend J. Howard Whittmore, who wrote to Cassatt to tell her of his admiration for the work, she replied at the time: "It is a great pleasure and gratification to me that you like and want to own that particular picture, the 'Tonda' for I have always thought it one of my best." Un-hampered by the confines of the tondo shape in Children Playing with a Cat, Cassatt opens the composition to allow both the mother and infant to sit upright, and to give them and the little girl their own space. The combination of its charming intimacy, large scale, and complexity of composition place it among her most important works of the 1900s.
The model for the child in Children Playing with a Cat is a young girl known as Sara, and the model for the mother is Renée Chauvet, a woman from a village close to the artist's chateau at Beaufresne, fifty miles northwest of Paris. After 1900 Cassatt often used local models.  Chauvet was a favorite whom Cassatt also portrays in Young Mother and Two Children (figure 2), as well as in other paintings depicting maternal affection during the period 1905 to 1910.
Because the older child in each of these works is female, hence, woman-to-be and potential mother, it is possible to interpret the variation on the theme of mother and child as a rite of introduction to maternity (Frank Getlein, Mary Cassatt: Paintings and Prints, New York, 1980, p. 140).  As Griselda Pollock explains, "Cassatt conferred on the feminine a greater degree of realism, for she subtly represented the structures of the world of women, the artifice and the process by which the child was made the feminine woman" (Mary Cassatt, New York, 1980, p. 23).
As is typical in Cassatt's mothers and children, each figure in Children Playing with a Cat is individually engaged. The mother looks at the baby; the baby stares at the cat; and the young girl focuses on the baby. Their behavior is completely natural and realistic, and Cassatt avoids any note of sentimentality. The success of the composition depends in part on Cassatt's growing interest in the details of her subjects' attire. In fact, during Cassatt's late period, from 1900-15, the artist was perhaps even more interested in the depiction of costume and textiles than in the shape of the underlying figures. In her present painting, as in other Cassatt pastels from this period, the elder child's dress and elaborate hat not only draw the viewer's attention immediately to her, but also reveal the artist's fascination with the extravagant fashions of the era. Cassatt's interest in depicting elegant costume can also be seen in the emphasis the artist gives to the green fabric of the mother's gown in The Caress (1902, National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, D.C.) and in what Nancy Mowll Mathews describes as the insistent linear patterns of the garments in Young Mother Sewing (1902, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
Cassatt's focus on color in the present painting demonstrates a new direction for the artist. Nancy Mowll Mathews comments: "Rather than finding all the colors of the spectrum within a few square inches of flesh, we find them in discrete areas on the canvas. From the red-blue of the vase on the mantel to the blue-green of the child's dress, to the yellow of the mother's dress and its yellow-orange accents, and finally to the red of the chairback behind her, Cassatt has arranged the colors in the order in which they would appear on a color chart. It is surprising to find this kind of color experimentation in Cassatt's work at this time. It hints not only at an awareness of current Divisionist color theories being proposed by Matisse and other radical artists but also at an interest, albeit restrained, in putting them into practice. Despite her well-known disdain for Matisse's work and his followers, Cassatt, like most older artists in Paris during this tumultuous decade, could not shut out his influence entirely" (Mary Cassatt, New York, 1987, p. 135).