Lot Essay
Nowhere is Mary Cassatt's original gift for drawing more evident than in the beautiful sketches of mothers and children she made in the last half of her career. The long confident lines evoke not just arms, back or shoulders but ineffable emotion. Her skill is such that writers cast about for ways of putting into words the truthfulness of Cassatt's portrayal of the relationship of mother and child which, in the end, rests on the tilt of head or curve of an arm.
Standing in front of such a masterful display, it is hard for the viewer to believe that in her early career Cassatt was thought to lack talent as a draftsman. "It is a pity that both Miss Cassatt and I are so defective in drawing..." (Emily Sartain to her father, May 8, 1873 in Mathews, Cassatt and Her Circle: Selected Letters, New York, 1984, p. 116) wrote a fellow art student of Cassatt's almost thirty years before the date of this extraordinary pastel sketch. While she was thought to have "talent of the brush," her unusual drawing technique was decried as downright "slovenly" by the academic masters who judged her work each year at the Paris Salon. (Emily Sartain to her father, June 17, 1874, in Mathews, Letters, p. 126)
It was not until Cassatt joined the Impressionists in the mid 1870s and encountered the more abstract styles of Degas, Morisot and Renoir that her own natural ability began to be recognized and nurtured. In the decades that followed, Cassatt refined her skill not only in pencil and chalk, but in an array of print media including the elegant drypoint process. Her prints won the admiration of the younger progressive artists of the 1890s whose standard-bearer, the critic Félix Fénéon, praised in her drypoints the clean, enveloping outlines and unexpected arabesques she created with her "slender stroke." ("On Cassatt's Exhibition of Color Prints, 1891," Le Chat Noir, April 11, 1891, cited in Mathews, Mary Cassatt: A Retrospective, New York, 1996, p. 182)
Until 1900 Cassatt's fine lines were mostly visible in small-scale works like prints or in the deliberately unfinished edges of her completed pastels. In her early career, large, preparatory pastel and oil sketches like Mother and Nude Child survived in extremely small numbers either because she did not do them or she did not care to save them. But the sudden explosion of surviving sketches in her late period suggests that they took on new meaning at this point. A studio session with models for the mother and child seems to have yielded multiple ideas for finished works. Mother and Nude Child belongs to a cluster of about a dozen sketches which evolved while Cassatt sat with her pastel box and sheets of lightly colored pastel paper, moving fluidly from one sketch to the next as her models changed their poses. From this series of sketches she produced four oils and pastels which she turned over to her dealer, Durand-Ruel, in 1903.
For the most part Cassatt kept the sketches in her own possession where they formed a private holding very different in character from the group she launched into a public sphere via Durand-Ruel. The related finished works such as The Caress (National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC) and Reine Lefebvre Holding a Nude Baby (figure a) were placed in major exhibitions in the United States and became some of Cassatt's first works to enter American museums. Tighter and more formal in style, they reflected Cassatt's recent study of Italian Old Master paintings during a collecting trip with Harry and Louisine Havemeyer to Italy in 1901. Consequently they appeared to the more conservative American art public and established her reputation in her native country as "The Most Eminent of Living American Women Painters." (Current Opinion, February 1909, cited in Mathews, Mary Cassatt: A Life, New York, 1994, p. 286)
The sketches on the other hand seemed to have been for her own personal use and reflected a growing split between the public and private spheres in other aspects of Cassatt's life and art. In her younger days, Cassatt did not hesitate to express her private thoughts and opinions in public, nor did she shrink from displaying her own home and family in her art. She even exhibited paintings of her sister Lydia in spite of Lydia's increasing battles with a fatal illness, Bright's Disease. She placed unfinished works, such as early states of her etchings, alongside the finished versions in Impressionsist exhibitions. But as fame made her an object of curiousity to journalists and curiosity seekers, she increasingly drew a line between public and private, preferring to meet strangers in her Paris apartment rather than at her more relaxed country home, Beaufresne, and refusing to supply biographical information and photographs to writers on modern art. The difference between Mother and Nude Child, which she later passed on to a devoted collector, Payson Thompson, and the finished oil, which was meant for public dispay, illustrates the new split between the more casual and vulnerable woman her friends knew and the polished, formal image she presented to the world.
Cassatt's public persona, like her formal mother and child paintings, took on an iconic quality after 1900. She had been identified with the "modern Madonna" theme since 1890, which conferred upon her the status of elder statesman, particularly in the eyes of the young American art students who continued to pour into Paris. Ever an opponent of the academic system which had overlooked her original talent, she advised the eager pilgrims to avoid the overcrowded académies and construct their own styles by combining the art of the museums with the best of modern French masters. Her own finished mother and child paintings, such as Reine Lefebvre Holding a Nude Baby offered such a model. The richness of paint and the solid figures invite comparision to old master madonnas, while the contemporary dress and abstract patterns created by the bold lines of costume and chair locate the work within a modern sensibility.
Cassatt's sketches for the finished works, however, suggest a more personal agenda for the mother and child. Mother and Nude Child has less of an icionic madonna-like meaning. Rather, the intimacy of it reminds us that Cassatt's initial inspiration for the mother and child series came from her own family when she based the first of many maternal drypoints on her sister-in-law and nephew, Gardner Cassatt, in 1888. Although not family, the model in this instance, Reine Lefebvre, was a woman from the area around Cassatt's country home rather than being a professional model brought out from Paris. Much of the emphasis Cassatt gave to the preliminary sketching process in this period may have come from the fact that she was now using so many non-professional models. She traded the ease of working with an experienced model for the spontaneity of pose and expression that emerged serendipitously with models new to the situation.
Mother and Nude Child also reveals more of Cassatt's initial, purely sensuous approach to the subject which preceded her final complex and intellectualized version. A devoted figure painter-- landscape and narrative subjects interested her very little--Cassatt was drawn to the expressiveness of human flesh. In another age she might have specialized in nudes, since she openly admired these subjects in her favorite modern masters, Courbet and Degas. One of Louisine Havemeyer's earliest memories of Cassatt's eloquence was on the subject of one of Courbet's nudes, "She explained Courbet to me, spoke of the great painter in her flowing, generous way, called my attention to his marvelous execution, to his color, above all to his realism, to that poignant, palpitating medium of truth through which he sought expression." (Havemeyer, Sixteen to Sixty, Memoirs of a Collector, New York, 1961, cited in Mathews, Letters, p. 11) Cassatt applied this intense interest in the quality of flesh within her own chosen subjects of daily life, giving the faces and hands of both male and female adults special expressiveness, and concentrating on the glowing surface texture of nude children. This sensuous study of light and color was one of her greatest pleasures; and one that she freely admitted in her characteristic scorn of prudishness of any kind. When failing eyesight in 1913 forced her to cut back on her painting, she gave up the practice with great reluctance: "I have had to drop nude children for the moment, it is too absorbing," she wrote Louisine Havemeyer. (September 11, 1913, cited in Mathews, A Life, p. 302)
When Cassatt executed Mother and Nude Child, she was at the height of her powers. The deft handling of the pastel strokes to create surface and three-dimensionality simultaneously is clearly evident. The light touch with a stump to blend colors--blue in the baby's back, green in the mother's hair--appears to reward close inspection. Although the inner Cassatt was known only to a privledged few in her later years, sketches like these allow us to glimpse the wit and originality that she displayed freely only in the private world of her studio.
Christie's is grateful to Nancy Mowll Mathews for contributing this catalogue essay.
This pastel will be included in the Cassatt Committee's revision of Adelyn Dohme Breeskin's catalogue raisonné of the works of Mary Cassatt.
Standing in front of such a masterful display, it is hard for the viewer to believe that in her early career Cassatt was thought to lack talent as a draftsman. "It is a pity that both Miss Cassatt and I are so defective in drawing..." (Emily Sartain to her father, May 8, 1873 in Mathews, Cassatt and Her Circle: Selected Letters, New York, 1984, p. 116) wrote a fellow art student of Cassatt's almost thirty years before the date of this extraordinary pastel sketch. While she was thought to have "talent of the brush," her unusual drawing technique was decried as downright "slovenly" by the academic masters who judged her work each year at the Paris Salon. (Emily Sartain to her father, June 17, 1874, in Mathews, Letters, p. 126)
It was not until Cassatt joined the Impressionists in the mid 1870s and encountered the more abstract styles of Degas, Morisot and Renoir that her own natural ability began to be recognized and nurtured. In the decades that followed, Cassatt refined her skill not only in pencil and chalk, but in an array of print media including the elegant drypoint process. Her prints won the admiration of the younger progressive artists of the 1890s whose standard-bearer, the critic Félix Fénéon, praised in her drypoints the clean, enveloping outlines and unexpected arabesques she created with her "slender stroke." ("On Cassatt's Exhibition of Color Prints, 1891," Le Chat Noir, April 11, 1891, cited in Mathews, Mary Cassatt: A Retrospective, New York, 1996, p. 182)
Until 1900 Cassatt's fine lines were mostly visible in small-scale works like prints or in the deliberately unfinished edges of her completed pastels. In her early career, large, preparatory pastel and oil sketches like Mother and Nude Child survived in extremely small numbers either because she did not do them or she did not care to save them. But the sudden explosion of surviving sketches in her late period suggests that they took on new meaning at this point. A studio session with models for the mother and child seems to have yielded multiple ideas for finished works. Mother and Nude Child belongs to a cluster of about a dozen sketches which evolved while Cassatt sat with her pastel box and sheets of lightly colored pastel paper, moving fluidly from one sketch to the next as her models changed their poses. From this series of sketches she produced four oils and pastels which she turned over to her dealer, Durand-Ruel, in 1903.
For the most part Cassatt kept the sketches in her own possession where they formed a private holding very different in character from the group she launched into a public sphere via Durand-Ruel. The related finished works such as The Caress (National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC) and Reine Lefebvre Holding a Nude Baby (figure a) were placed in major exhibitions in the United States and became some of Cassatt's first works to enter American museums. Tighter and more formal in style, they reflected Cassatt's recent study of Italian Old Master paintings during a collecting trip with Harry and Louisine Havemeyer to Italy in 1901. Consequently they appeared to the more conservative American art public and established her reputation in her native country as "The Most Eminent of Living American Women Painters." (Current Opinion, February 1909, cited in Mathews, Mary Cassatt: A Life, New York, 1994, p. 286)
The sketches on the other hand seemed to have been for her own personal use and reflected a growing split between the public and private spheres in other aspects of Cassatt's life and art. In her younger days, Cassatt did not hesitate to express her private thoughts and opinions in public, nor did she shrink from displaying her own home and family in her art. She even exhibited paintings of her sister Lydia in spite of Lydia's increasing battles with a fatal illness, Bright's Disease. She placed unfinished works, such as early states of her etchings, alongside the finished versions in Impressionsist exhibitions. But as fame made her an object of curiousity to journalists and curiosity seekers, she increasingly drew a line between public and private, preferring to meet strangers in her Paris apartment rather than at her more relaxed country home, Beaufresne, and refusing to supply biographical information and photographs to writers on modern art. The difference between Mother and Nude Child, which she later passed on to a devoted collector, Payson Thompson, and the finished oil, which was meant for public dispay, illustrates the new split between the more casual and vulnerable woman her friends knew and the polished, formal image she presented to the world.
Cassatt's public persona, like her formal mother and child paintings, took on an iconic quality after 1900. She had been identified with the "modern Madonna" theme since 1890, which conferred upon her the status of elder statesman, particularly in the eyes of the young American art students who continued to pour into Paris. Ever an opponent of the academic system which had overlooked her original talent, she advised the eager pilgrims to avoid the overcrowded académies and construct their own styles by combining the art of the museums with the best of modern French masters. Her own finished mother and child paintings, such as Reine Lefebvre Holding a Nude Baby offered such a model. The richness of paint and the solid figures invite comparision to old master madonnas, while the contemporary dress and abstract patterns created by the bold lines of costume and chair locate the work within a modern sensibility.
Cassatt's sketches for the finished works, however, suggest a more personal agenda for the mother and child. Mother and Nude Child has less of an icionic madonna-like meaning. Rather, the intimacy of it reminds us that Cassatt's initial inspiration for the mother and child series came from her own family when she based the first of many maternal drypoints on her sister-in-law and nephew, Gardner Cassatt, in 1888. Although not family, the model in this instance, Reine Lefebvre, was a woman from the area around Cassatt's country home rather than being a professional model brought out from Paris. Much of the emphasis Cassatt gave to the preliminary sketching process in this period may have come from the fact that she was now using so many non-professional models. She traded the ease of working with an experienced model for the spontaneity of pose and expression that emerged serendipitously with models new to the situation.
Mother and Nude Child also reveals more of Cassatt's initial, purely sensuous approach to the subject which preceded her final complex and intellectualized version. A devoted figure painter-- landscape and narrative subjects interested her very little--Cassatt was drawn to the expressiveness of human flesh. In another age she might have specialized in nudes, since she openly admired these subjects in her favorite modern masters, Courbet and Degas. One of Louisine Havemeyer's earliest memories of Cassatt's eloquence was on the subject of one of Courbet's nudes, "She explained Courbet to me, spoke of the great painter in her flowing, generous way, called my attention to his marvelous execution, to his color, above all to his realism, to that poignant, palpitating medium of truth through which he sought expression." (Havemeyer, Sixteen to Sixty, Memoirs of a Collector, New York, 1961, cited in Mathews, Letters, p. 11) Cassatt applied this intense interest in the quality of flesh within her own chosen subjects of daily life, giving the faces and hands of both male and female adults special expressiveness, and concentrating on the glowing surface texture of nude children. This sensuous study of light and color was one of her greatest pleasures; and one that she freely admitted in her characteristic scorn of prudishness of any kind. When failing eyesight in 1913 forced her to cut back on her painting, she gave up the practice with great reluctance: "I have had to drop nude children for the moment, it is too absorbing," she wrote Louisine Havemeyer. (September 11, 1913, cited in Mathews, A Life, p. 302)
When Cassatt executed Mother and Nude Child, she was at the height of her powers. The deft handling of the pastel strokes to create surface and three-dimensionality simultaneously is clearly evident. The light touch with a stump to blend colors--blue in the baby's back, green in the mother's hair--appears to reward close inspection. Although the inner Cassatt was known only to a privledged few in her later years, sketches like these allow us to glimpse the wit and originality that she displayed freely only in the private world of her studio.
Christie's is grateful to Nancy Mowll Mathews for contributing this catalogue essay.
This pastel will be included in the Cassatt Committee's revision of Adelyn Dohme Breeskin's catalogue raisonné of the works of Mary Cassatt.