Modern Discoveries

Modern Discoveries

View full screen - View 1 of Lot 814. Girl in a Hat with a Black Ribbon.

The Collection of Jay I. Kislak: Sold to Benefit the Kislak Family Foundation

Mary Cassatt

Girl in a Hat with a Black Ribbon

Lot Closed

October 4, 04:14 PM GMT

Estimate

200,000 - 300,000 USD

Lot Details

Description

The Collection of Jay I. Kislak: Sold to Benefit the Kislak Family Foundation

Mary Cassatt

1844 - 1926

Girl in a Hat with a Black Ribbon


signed Mary Cassatt (lower right)

pastel on paper

17 ¾ by 21 ½ in.

45.1 by 54.6 cm.

Executed circa 1901-02.


This pastel will be included in the Cassatt Committee's revision of Adelyn Dohme Breeskin's catalogue raisonné of the works of Mary Cassatt. 

Saidye Bronfman, Québec

Edgar M. Bronfman, New York (acquired by descent from the above in 1995)

Christie's New York, 22 May 2014, lot 44 (consigned by the above)

Acquired from the above by the present owner

In 1877, at the invitation of her friend Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt became the only American artist to join the French Impressionist group working in Paris, known collectively as the Independents. Although she initially studied with more traditional academic painters and regularly submitted her work to the Paris Salon, through her acquaintance with Degas, Cassatt grew familiar with the techniques that would come to define the Impressionist 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 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” (as quoted in Louisine W. Havemeyer, Sixteen to Sixty, New York, 1961, p. 275).


Like Degas, Cassatt became increasingly preoccupied with the pastel medium and by the 1890s, it had become her primary means of expression. Pastel allowed Cassatt to reveal her accomplished draftsmanship, while displaying a rich layering of color and tone as demonstrated in Girl in a Hat with a Black Ribbon, which she executed circa 1901-02.