Portrait of a Lady

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 (1880), 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 (her brother became president of the Pennsylvania Railroad), she quietly lent much of it to Paris Dealer Durand-Ruel to help back the impressionists and sold Pissarro (of whom she said "he could have taught stones to draw correctly") 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.

Her great mentor Degas perhaps caught her contrary character best in his 1884 portrait. Wistful, Cassatt sits in slight supplication, knees and wrists together, her eyes deflected in reverie, her hands holding playing cards like a fan. She was appalled that he depicted her with gambler's tools, but for all her chamber-music modesty, she was not without a sense of humor. She loved recounting Degas' remark as he admired one of her many mother-and-child scenes, "It has all your qualities and all your faults," he had said, unable to resist an acid aside. "It is the Infant Jesus and his English nanny."

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