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Lot Essay
Ellen with Bows in Her Hair, Looking Right, a portrait of the artist's niece Ellen Mary Cassatt, is a delightful example of Mary Cassatt's work in pastel. With remarkably few strokes, Cassatt has managed not only to depict Ellen Mary, but to evoke the happy innocence of childhood. Ellen Mary was the second daughter of Mary Cassatt's brother Joseph Gardner Cassatt. This portrait was probably executed in 1899 during the artist's only extended visit to the United States after she had settled in Paris in 1874. By the late 1890s, Cassatt took to pastel as another means of expanding her artistic realm after having achieved incredible success with her oils in the Impressionist style. By building up her subject with countless carefully placed pastel lines and marks, Cassatt created "a masterpiece of simplicity." (N.M. Mathews, Mary Cassatt, New York, 1987, p. 72)
Indeed images of children are often more powerful than those of their adult counterparts, for their youth represents vast potential rather than past accomplishments or acts. At roughly the same time that Cassatt executed this pastel of her niece, Camille Mauclaire published this reiteration of the virtues of childhood: "A child is moving forward, and this is its special beauty, reckless, radiant, irresistibly affecting, made to bring tears to older eyes. Its imprudence is disarming and enchanting. A laughing, singing, lisping, unselfconscious, naked child is extraordinarily, magnetically attractive." (C. Mauclaire, "A Painter of Childhood" in L'Art Decoratif, August 1902, as quoted in N.M. Mathews, Ed., Cassatt: A Retrospective, New York, 1996, p. 268)
This pastel will be included in the Cassatt Committee's revision of Adelyn Dohme Breeskin's catalogue raisonn of the works of Mary Cassatt.
Indeed images of children are often more powerful than those of their adult counterparts, for their youth represents vast potential rather than past accomplishments or acts. At roughly the same time that Cassatt executed this pastel of her niece, Camille Mauclaire published this reiteration of the virtues of childhood: "A child is moving forward, and this is its special beauty, reckless, radiant, irresistibly affecting, made to bring tears to older eyes. Its imprudence is disarming and enchanting. A laughing, singing, lisping, unselfconscious, naked child is extraordinarily, magnetically attractive." (C. Mauclaire, "A Painter of Childhood" in L'Art Decoratif, August 1902, as quoted in N.M. Mathews, Ed., Cassatt: A Retrospective, New York, 1996, p. 268)
This pastel will be included in the Cassatt Committee's revision of Adelyn Dohme Breeskin's catalogue raisonn of the works of Mary Cassatt.