Cassatt

When a celebrated painter dies, the newspaper obituaries--necessarily circumspect--seldom make mention of that painter's relatives or relationships. The first are apt to be unimportant; the latter, bizarre. But when Mary Cassatt died last week in Paris, notices were full of the careers of the other Philadelphia Cassatts--of her brothers, the late Alexander J., one-time President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, of J. Gardner, head of a banking house. Miss Cassatt was born in Pittsburgh in 1855. She was a "U. S. artist" only by courtesy. Her visits to her country were infrequent and of short duration.

"I will not admit that a woman can draw as well as that."

Hilaire Germain Edgard Degas, long years ago, standing in front of one of Mary Cassatt's paintings, turned with his slow, twisting smile to a companion. The remark was perhaps the highest compliment she everreceived--more satisfactory even than the one the Luxembourg paid her when it bought one of her paintings on behalf of the citizens of France. Degas, that superlative draughtsman, who alone of all painters has immortalized the beauty of awkwardness, knew what he was talking about. Miss Cassatt could draw. At that time she had not come under Degas' influence but had caught her inspiration from the floating, luminous figures of Correggio. "Maternity," "The Bath," "Mother's Cares," "Breakfast in Bed," "Children Playing with a Cat," are titles that more befit memorial calendars than good paintings. Critics have hinted that Miss Cassatt might have painted better if she had been married; maternity would then have had less fascination for her. This is a shallow suggestion; if she had borne children she might not have made paintings. She projected her instinct in oil and, since she possessed a first class intellect, and submitted herself to rigid discipline, she learned how to paint superbly.

In 1877, after she had exhibited for six successive years in the Salon, one of her paintings was refused. Degas invited her to join the exhibitions of the Impressionists and she accepted with enthusiasm. Her style sustained an immediate and vast improvement; she lost the literary quality that had impaired her early efforts and began to work more blandly. She still dreamt sentimentally of motherhood, but she painted her concept like a realist; her children's eyes were the holy, sightless eyes of Correggio's cherubs but their bodies were the bodies of minute Frenchmen, hired for thirty francs a week in a Paris atelier, and drawn with surpassing skill. The great museums began to buy her pictures. Very few are privately owned--only those which she put on sale in March, 1924, when her doctor told her she was going blind. Like many an American of artistic intelligence, she was far better known in Europe than in the U. S.