Post-Civil War America was a graceless murk
of brownstones, soft-coal soot and ungainly walnut furniture. It was
Victorian without even the fun of having royalty, and Critic Lewis
Mumford summed up the period in a phrase, “the Brown Decades.” By
contrast, Europe attracted droves of artists in search of more romantic
sensibilities. Of these exiles, none found herself more at home in
France, while remaining essentially as American as a Henry James
heroine, than Mary Cassatt. As her palette brightened, she became the
only U.S. expatriate accepted by the fiercely iconoclastic French
impressionists, and was invited to show in four of their five
independent salons. She even won the admiration of the notorious
misogynist Edgar Degas: “There is someone who sees as I do.” Strictly Ordered. Mary Cassatt's father, a Pittsburgh banker, had said
that he would almost rather see her dead than become an artist. But she
proved to have an equally strong will. During the Civil War she studied
at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, then, at the age of 23,
traveled to Paris. Degas first opened her eyes. Wrote Cassatt: “I used
to go and flatten my nose against the picture dealer's window and
absorb all I could of his art. It changed my life.” Where the other impressionists made a cult of painting out-of-doors,
Mary Cassatt rarely left the drawing room. From the new fads for
photography and Japanese prints, she introduced cropped images and
flattened perspectives into her interiors. In A Cup of Tea , the
stripy wallpaper anchors the otherwise impossible perspective, so
tilted that the tea service seems ready to slide off the picture. Yet
the scene is strictly ordered. The smooth sweep from the china on the
tray through the woman's hands to her lips spatially expresses a
measured social gesture. The painting, on view at an exhibition of her
works in Manhattan's Knoedler gallery, is an example of her ability to
distill drama from casual domestic scenes. Stones That Draw. Cassatt never married, but she lived a full family
life until her death in 1926. Her parents, sisters, nephews and nieces
were always visiting her villa on the Riviera, her Paris flat or
chateau near Beauvais. Even in her old age, she had a prim, acerbic
wit: she found Monet too unintelligent, criticized Renoir's lusty art
as too “animal,” scorned the generation of the cubists as “cafe
loafers.” She could also be generous. As she never lacked for money , she quietly lent much
of it to Paris Dealer Durand-Ruel to help back the impressionists and
sold Pissarro at her tea parties. She was largely responsible for the
Havemeyer collection, which stocked New York's Metropolitan Museum of
Art with many of its great El Grecos, Manets, Courbets and Corots.
