Work – in the sense of toil – is about the last thing a 19th-century painter wished to be associated with. Inspiration and success were gifts bestowed on the lucky few – about as easy to grasp as smoke. For Mary Cassatt, however, art was nothing more than work. ‘Effort upon effort,’ is how she described the process of painting to her friend, the collector Louisine Havemeyer.
Pissarro admired her technical skill, Gauguin her charm and strength, but Degas was her true mentor
Still, she produced almost 1,000 works in her lifetime, and Mary Cassatt at Work – a new exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art – tells us how. Spoiler: unswerving determination, ambition and, well, work.
With 130 paintings, pastels, drawings, and prints (36 of these works from the PMA’s own holdings), the exhibition is the largest devoted to Cassatt in the US in more than 25 years, and the first since 1985 in Philadelphia – where she lived for part of her teens and attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Cassatt is ripe for revisiting. In the century since her death she has been corralled as the painter of children and mothers which, though largely accurate, is reductive and has come to dull and diminish her. This new show looks in other, less hackneyed directions at her work. In sympathetic style, it considers Cassatt’s devout professionalism; the ways in which she laid bare the work of her hands – knowingly leaving signs of manufacture in her pictures – and her perceptive portrayals of the work she observed in the domestic sphere.
The show begins with an introductory room – its few objects spotlit; its dark walls conducive to........