Tag Archives: Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt’s Young Mother Sewing (1900)

When we think of the Impres­sion­ists, we tend to think about Mon­et, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne…and quite right­ly, because they were titans of their art. How­ev­er, less well-known to us (always the way, unfor­tu­nate­ly, eh ladies?) were “les trois grandes dames” of Impres­sion­ism, name­ly Marie Brac­que­mond, Berthe Morisot and the sub­ject of today’s blog, Mary Cas­satt. These women more than held their own amongst their male coun­ter­parts; all three pro­duced won­der­ful art and exhib­it­ed suc­cess­ful­ly at the Paris Salons.

Mary Cas­satt was a young Amer­i­can artist who arrived in Paris in 1866, hav­ing quit the Penn­syl­va­nia Acad­e­my of the Fine Arts back home, due to the lack of inspi­ra­tion and patro­n­is­ing atti­tude of the male stu­dents and teach­ers there. Although we asso­ciate the birth of fem­i­nism with the ear­ly 1900s, the first wave of fem­i­nism began as ear­ly as the 1840s, and some doors were opened to women, par­tic­u­lar­ly in cos­mopoli­tan Paris, to which Mary was drawn.

Not all doors were opened, how­ev­er: women still couldn’t study art at the pres­ti­gious École des Beaux-Arts so Cas­satt signed up for pri­vate study with Jean-Léon Gérôme, (the Ori­en­tal­ist I wrote about back in March) and she became an advo­cate for women’s equal­i­ty all her life. She became a friend and col­lab­o­ra­tor of Edgar Degas, too. They had stu­dios a five-minute stroll apart, and Degas would reg­u­lar­ly look in at Mary’s stu­dio, offer­ing advice and help­ing find mod­els.

Cassatt’s art cen­tred on the lives of women, and in par­tic­u­lar she paint­ed many works depict­ing the inti­mate bond between moth­er and child. It is that aspect I am show­cas­ing here, with a gallery of pieces fea­tur­ing some often touch­ing depic­tions of moth­er and child, begin­ning with Young Moth­er Sewing, paint­ed in 1900 and pur­chased a year lat­er by influ­en­tial art col­lec­tor and fem­i­nist Loui­sine Have­mey­er, who fit­ting­ly used it to raise mon­ey for the wom­en’s suf­frage cause.


Mary Cas­satt