9781422271735

MARY CASSATT

PLATE 5 AMusical Party (1874) Oil on canvas, 38 x 26 inches (96.5 x 66 cm)

Cassatt was a cosmopolitan figure with a wide experience of European countries before she settled in Paris. During her travels, she encountered a wide range of art styles and cultures and absorbed something from each, studying and painting in the cities she visited. This painting was made while she was in Rome and already exhibits an originality of composition, which remains a feature of all her work. It is dominated by a sinuous S curve rising from the fleshy chest through the turned backward tilted head, moving the viewer back into the picture, picked up by the turned shoulders of the second figure and completed by the dark head above. Additionally, there is a deliberate circular movement outlining the two lower figures. Mary Ellison was a friend of Cassatt’s in the small American expatriate group in Paris in the period following the Franco-Prussian War, and she is believed to be the subject of this theatrical painting inspired, as were a number of such works both by Cassatt and other painters, by Renoir’s entrancing and elegant painting La Loge . Both Cassatt and Ellison were part of the theater-going, gallery-visiting members of the privileged and monied circle in the city. This is a contemplative, introspective figure painted with the new free style that Cassatt was beginning to develop under the influence of Degas. PLATE 6 (right) Mary Ellison (c. 1878) Oil on canvas, 33 1 ⁄ 2 x 25 3 ⁄ 4 inches (85 x 65.4 cm)

have been added to ignorance. The extent to which that affected Cassatt is problematic, but her works rarely include male figures, and when they do, they are portraits or otherwise show small male children. Only three male portraits exist of any but her own family members, most of these taken from the family of the brother who was closest to her. Mary left the Academy in 1865 and in the following year, departed for Europe to make a study of the Old Masters at firsthand. Although the United States has by now become the repository of many of the greatest works

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