.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Mary Cassatt painted Susan in a Toque with Two Roses about 1881, not long after her first participation with the French Impressionists, with whom she showed in 1879 at their fourth exhibition. "If we look at the paintings and pastels of the early days of Cassatt's Impressionist affiliation," writes Nancy Matthews, "we can discern her efforts to achieve the new realism touted by the Impressionists...Most striking is Cassatt's interest in capturing life in its normal and unposed state....Although a simple concept, the naturalistic effect in art was hard won, requiring subtle adjustments of form and content and a concentrated effort to achieve the appearance of effortlessness." (Mary Cassatt, New York, 1987, p. 43) As Judith Barter recently noted, Cassatt's sources for her art were varied. "To devise compositional strategies for her depictions of women in public and private places, Cassatt looked not only to the traditions of society portraiture but also to illustrations in contemporary fashion magazines. She was not alone in this: her new colleagues, including Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet, and Berthe Morisot, had earlier turned to these sources for thematic and compositional models." (Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman, Chicago, 1998, pp.47-8.
Her subject in the present work is a young woman fashionably dressed for the out-of-doors, in a dark, fur-trimmed coat and stylish hat. Apparently she is seated, as if on a bench, with the trunk of a tree visible over her right shoulder. The painting relates in its subject, a young woman, to many of Cassatt's paintings of this period, perhaps most closely to her painting of 1880 entitled Autumn (Muse du Petit Palais, Paris). Both are freely rendered, half-length portraits of a young woman, seemingly lost in thought, her attention fixed elsewhere.
In the case of the present picture, her model, Susan, is the daughter of her housekeeper, Mathilde Vallet, and was a favorite model of the artist in the 1880s. Cassatt paints her as a girl, only a few years beyond childhood into adolescence. In contrast to the background, which is broadly and rapidly painted by Cassatt, lending an effect of plein-air painting, the young woman's face is highly finished. She executes the work with clear pinks and blues, and with brush strokes of rich color, marking this as one of the finest and most pleasing examples of Cassatt's early portraits.
This painting will be included in the Cassatt Committee's revision of Adelyn Dohme Breeskin's catalogue raisonn of the works of Mary Cassatt.
Her subject in the present work is a young woman fashionably dressed for the out-of-doors, in a dark, fur-trimmed coat and stylish hat. Apparently she is seated, as if on a bench, with the trunk of a tree visible over her right shoulder. The painting relates in its subject, a young woman, to many of Cassatt's paintings of this period, perhaps most closely to her painting of 1880 entitled Autumn (Muse du Petit Palais, Paris). Both are freely rendered, half-length portraits of a young woman, seemingly lost in thought, her attention fixed elsewhere.
In the case of the present picture, her model, Susan, is the daughter of her housekeeper, Mathilde Vallet, and was a favorite model of the artist in the 1880s. Cassatt paints her as a girl, only a few years beyond childhood into adolescence. In contrast to the background, which is broadly and rapidly painted by Cassatt, lending an effect of plein-air painting, the young woman's face is highly finished. She executes the work with clear pinks and blues, and with brush strokes of rich color, marking this as one of the finest and most pleasing examples of Cassatt's early portraits.
This painting will be included in the Cassatt Committee's revision of Adelyn Dohme Breeskin's catalogue raisonn of the works of Mary Cassatt.