Mary Cassatt between Paris & New York: The Making of a Transatlantic Legacy – book review

This beautifully illustrated book considers the importance of the American painter and printmaker Mary Cassatt, who moved to Paris, spending time in the company of impressionists and influencing tastes in her native US

Mary Cassatt between Paris & New York: The Making of a Transatlantic Legacy, published by University of California Press.

reviewed by NICOLA HOMER

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) was an American painter and printmaker. She worked in Paris amid the circle of French impressionists. The scholar of impressionism John Rewald described her as a follower of Edgar Degas (1834-1917), yet while she greatly admired Degas, who introduced her to the group and facilitated her discovery of printmaking, she was a skilled artist in her own right. As an art adviser, she exercised an important influence on American taste, so much of her work is held in collections in the United States. After moving to the cultural capital of Paris, Cassatt established a residence in the city and another in the countryside, turning a little mill in the grounds of the latter into a studio and installing her printing press there. In her new book, Mary Cassatt Between Paris & New York: The Making of a Transatlantic Legacy, the art historian Ruth E Iskin notes that Cassatt insisted on producing her own prints with assistance from a master printer: “Commenting on the importance of doing the work herself, she said: ‘It makes a great difference, for no two impressions are exactly alike.’” Indeed, the etchings of Cassatt are notable for their delicacy of execution, as seen in her colour print The Letter (1890-91), drawn from a series inspired by a visit to a major exhibition of Japanese prints in Paris in 1890. 

The rare depiction of a young woman’s preparation of an envelope to send a letter shows that correspondence was an important means of transatlantic communication at that time, when telephones were not yet available. Iskin’s vignette of The Letter serves as part of an introduction to this beautifully illustrated book, which locates Cassatt’s life, career and art in the context of her transatlantic networks, collecting activities and politics. The book explores the artist’s identity, as an American citizen and a cultural nationalist, who appears to have regarded collecting “as a patriotic act” and was engaged in the suffrage debate in the US, and who, as a member of the French impressionist circle, made an enduring impact by encouraging her wealthy friends to buy impressionist artworks. Cassatt wrote many letters to her longtime friend, the New York-based collector and philanthropist Louisine Havemeyer, who organised a Loan Exhibition of Masterpieces by Old and Modern Painters, in New York in 1915, for which Cassatt teamed up with Degas. Proceeds from the exhibition went to the New York suffrage campaign, and this was the only occasion on which Cassatt explicitly supported American women’s suffrage in the public sphere. On 26 August 1920, the 19th Amendment to the US constitution, giving women the right to vote, came into effect. Havemeyer was instrumental in persuading Cassatt to gift a major work to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: Lady at the Tea Table (1883-85) is a remarkable portrait that is suggestive of the rare refinement of American society, as depicted in novels by Henry James. The friendship of Cassatt and Havemeyer is the subject of one chapter in this illuminating and readable book. According to the author, this friendship produced an extensive collection of modern French art, a central part of which is now housed at The Met. 

Mary Cassatt, The Letter, between 1890 and 1891. Drypoint print, etching print and aquatint print on laid paper, 31.8 × 25 cm (12.5 × 9.8 in). Collection of National Gallery of Canada. Image Wikimedia Commons. Collection National Gallery of Canada

Iskin builds on the scholarship of Nancy Mowll Mathews, who is the author of an authoritative biography on Cassatt and has put together a volume of selected letters of the artist and her circle. In addition, Iskin draws on the work of the art historian Griselda Pollock, who has published a study of Cassatt’s oeuvre, seen through a feminist lens, illustrating how second wave feminism of the 1980s and 90s affected the reception of the artist’s work. At the beginning of the book, Iskin sets out her stall: “This book argues that Cassatt played an outsize role in the transatlantic art world of her time, bridging the Parisian and New York art worlds both through her own artistic reputation and in the unique impact she had through advising American collectors on acquiring contemporary French art. It aims to chart a revised understanding of Cassatt within the transatlantic context of her life and career and to analyze her posthumous legacy, with attention to the way in which it remains, even in today’s globalizing world, tied to the nationalist affiliations of museums on both sides of the Atlantic.” In the 344 pages of this beautifully illustrated academic tome, the author largely succeeds in grounding her argument with original research from archives, notably in her discussion of new information derived from two previously unknown installation photographs of the 1915 exhibition about “a nearly equal representation of Cassatt and Degas”. This highlights the achievements of an artist who had to overcome restrictions arising from her position as a woman and her nationality during her career in France.

After travelling in Europe, Cassatt settled in Paris in 1873, becoming acquainted with the “independents” or the “impressionists” as they were later known; she became close to Degas, who was perhaps the strongest influence on her work. In 1879, following Cassatt’s participation in her first impressionist exhibition, Degas helped to sell her painting The Nurse (1878), which was included in the exhibition. Yet as an American artist, she was perhaps on the fringes of impressionism, and like Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), she was excluded from the 1891 exhibition of the Société des Peintres-Graveurs Français because she was not French by birth. Nevertheless, that marked an important stage in her professional development as she successfully exhibited a set of colour prints in an adjacent exhibition space at Durand-Ruel’s gallery. Interestingly, Iskin offers an original reading of Pollock’s seminal essay Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity, which suggests that the urban spaces of Parisian modernity that Charles Baudelaire described in his writings connected with a masculine sphere, whereas the female impressionists Cassatt and Berthe Morisot (1841-95) situated their paintings in a domestic sphere as they had restricted access to the metropolitan space their male counterparts depicted. According to Iskin though: “Cassatt’s depiction of women in their homes was related less to the constraints on women’s movement in public spaces (though some of these spaces were surely not as hospitable to women) and more to her identification with the political arguments of American 19th- and early 20th-century feminists that in fact challenged the separation of spheres.”

The book contains seven chapters and these focus on Cassatt’s transatlantic network, friendships, feminism and engagement with suffrage debates of her time, as well as the 1915 Cassatt and Degas exhibition in New York and Cassatt’s legacy, as seen in art museums and national identity. Chapter one presents a fascinating survey of Cassatt’s transatlantic network of friends and colleagues, some of whom were art professionals, including an art critic, Forbes Watson, a curator, Sara T Hallowell, an architect, Theodate Pope, and an artist, Sarah Choate Sears, whose photographic practice led her to become acquainted with Gertrude Käsebier, whom Alfred Stieglitz, the founder of the journal Camera Work, praised as “the leading artistic portrait photographer of the day”. The next two chapters offer in-depth analyses of the artist’s friendship with Havemeyer and her professional and personal relationship with Degas, focusing on Cassatt’s agency and how she joined the impressionists through her explicit networking. In chapter four, we learn more about Cassatt’s support of suffrage and her dedication to work in her printing studio at her country residence, as she followed a rigorous schedule, which Havemeyer described: “Eight o’clock in the morning would find her in her gray blouse in the small pavilion over the dam … where she had installed her printing press. There she would work while daylight lasted with the aid of a printer. She did her own coloring and wiping of the plates. It was at the cost of much physical strain for she actually did the manual work.”

Mary Cassatt, Reading Le Figaro, 1878. Oil on canvas, 104 x 83.7 cm (40.9 x 32.9 in). Image Wikimedia Commons.

The book features coloured illustrations and, to give an example of Cassatt’s unique representation of women in the domestic sphere, there is a portrait of her mother, who was from a long-established Pennsylvanian family. Reading Le Figaro (1878) portrays the dignified status of the older woman, absorbed in reading a newspaper that connects her to the world. This supports the author’s reading that the artist was engaged with political arguments. There are further suggestions of the support for female artists displayed by Cassatt and her friends elsewhere in this book. In one letter to her friend Roger Marx, a critic, collector and museum official, she acknowledged that the position of women in the plastic arts was different from that of the important place of female writers in literature: “Only why has no woman really done anything in top-notch art? This is what I think after reading your article [on Berthe Morisot], Madame Vigée-Lebrun is the only one who survived, so to speak, and the portrait of David that I saw recently seemed to me to contain all of her work. In literature women have been so superior. I’m not talking about Georges [sic] Sand … But there are in England female novelists of the very first rank.” She continues by saying that Thomas Babington Macaulay “was not afraid to compare Jane Austen to Shakespeare”.

In her discussion of the correspondence, the author rightly offers a critique of it as she explains there were strong female artists in history, such as Artemisia Gentileschi, to give one example. Iskin offers an illuminating account of Cassatt’s life, work and legacy, which highlights her role as an art adviser in a transatlantic context, and correctly focuses on Degas, because he was particularly influential on Cassatt’s work in the circle of the impressionists, as she achieved success with her printmaking. Yet perhaps there might have been scope for further discussion of the influence on her work of the French painters Édouard Manet (1832-83) and Gustave Courbet (1819-77), seen in many of her paintings. Havemeyer wrote that Cassatt explained Courbet to her in a letter, which is quoted in Pollock’s 1980 biography. The National Gallery in Washington DC is planning an exhibition next year featuring Cassatt artworks in the museum’s collection, in honour of the centennial of the artist’s death, which presents a time to take another look at the artist and her connections.

• Mary Cassatt between Paris & New York: The Making of a Transatlantic Legacy by Ruth E Iskin is published by University of California Press, price US$49.95/£42..