Kick-Ass Women Impressionists

Ask anyone if they like the Impressionists, and everyone will sing the praises of Monet and his water-lilies, Degas and his ballerinas and circus performers, Renoir and his naked ladies, Van Gogh and his sunflowers and surreal backgrounds, maybe even Manet and his portraiture and Pissarro and his landscapes. But who remembers the two very special women connected with the Impressionist movement?

Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt were highly talented painters who took an active part in the Impressionist movement, working hard in their chosen profession and showing often in the prestigious exhibitions, winning the respect of critics and fellow painters alike. Not only did they leave behind a body of critically-acclaimed work—paintings that move and touch the observer by their tenderness, sheer beauty and understated elegance—they were also involved in encouraging and furthering the careers of their fellow painters.

MARY CASSATT (1844-1926)—AN AMERICAN PAINTER IN PARIS

Mary Cassatt was born in 1844, the daughter of a rich Pittsburgh banker. When she was only seven years old, her parents moved with her to Paris, France. She fell in love with painting and when they returned to the US, she made her parents enrol her in the city’s academy of fine arts, even though they did not think that it was proper for a young woman to become an artist—this was the 19^th century, after all. But Mary insisted and, before long, returned to Europe in her twenties to pursue an art education.

After spending a short time in a Parisian studio specializing in society portraits, she travelled to Italy, Spain, Belgium and Holland, studying and copying the Old Masters. Settling in Paris again after her travels, she met Degas, whom she had admired for some years, having seen his pastels in the window of a picture dealer on the boulevard Haussmann. “I used to go and flatten my nose against the window and absorb all I could of his art,” she said.

They became firm friends and Cassatt would pose for Degas occasionally, so that we have a good idea of what she looked like from some of his paintings. Degas’ Miss Cassatt at the Louvre, 1880 shows the back view of a smartly-dressed, slender young woman leaning rather jauntily on a rolled-up umbrella. At the Milliner’s, a pastel of 1882, shows her trying on a green hat to match her suit. She was fond of clothes and wore them well, cutting a chic and trim figure in her excursions aroundParis.

Both she and Degas were free spirits who valued their independence. “Oh, I am independent,” she told an American friend. “I can live alone and I love to work.” While Degas delighted in rowdy subject matter—backstage goings-on in the rough-and-tumble world of show-business, the circus and the racecourse, Mary Cassatt painted a more cultured clique—patrons of the theatre or opera in their boxes, e.g. A L’Opéra (At The Opera). Like Berthe Morisot, another female Impressionist painter of the time, Mary Cassatt also excelled at painting quiet domestic scenes, often tender portraiture of mothers and their children e.g. The Bath.

Some of her best works, e.g. La Loge (The Theatre Box) and La Tasse de Thé (The Cup of Tea) were shown in the fourth Impressionist exhibition (1879). She also showed in the fifth (1880), sixth (1881), and last Impressionist exhibitions (1886). One of the exhibits was the beautiful Femme Cousant (Woman Sewing) which became part of the famous collection left to the Louvre by the collector, Antonin Personnaz.

She became fascinated by print-making, influenced by the Japanese masters whom she and Degas discovered together. At her first solo exhibition, held at Duran-Ruel’s gallery in 1891, she showed a series of prints that evidenced this Japanese influence. She was instrumental in introducing the Impressionists to theUnited States, encouraging their dealer and champion, Paul Duran-Ruel, to exhibit their paintings in New York when most of them were still struggling, and steering American friends and prominent collectors to the exhibition. She also advised the great American collector, H. O. Havemeyer, whose collection of Impressionist art now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

For her efforts and contribution to the Impressionist cause, Mary Cassatt was awarded France’s Legion of Honour and acknowledged in her native US. Perhaps even more importantly for her, she lived to see her friends’ works honoured and their fortunes made.

BERTHE MORISOT (1841-1895)—“TO CAPTURE THE PASSING MOMENT”

Berthe Morisot, daughter of an important government official, himself an amateur artist in his youth, began drawing lessons very early. She worked under the tuition of Corot and counted Dégas and Fantin-Latour among her friends. Through the latter, she met Manet in 1868, while copying paintings by Rubens in the Louvre.

She posed for Manet in several of his paintings, including Le Balcon (The Balcony) where she and the other figures have rather stony expressions—Manet was notorious for making his sitters suffer, holding their poses through a dozen sessions.

In the exhibition of 1874 (the year she married Manet’s younger brother Eugène), she was the only woman to exhibit and showed nine works—paintings, pastels, and watercolours, attracting praise from the critics. First of her exhibits was Le Berceau (The Cradle), featuring her sister Edma and her baby, Blanche. Blanche and her older sister Jeanne, also modelled for their aunt in La Chasse aux Papillons (Chasing Butterflies).

She and Eugène visited England where she painted on the Isle of Wight and along the channel coast, subjects among her exhibits at the 1877 exhibition. She showed her works in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions, missing only that of 1879 because of the birth of her daughter Julie. By then, she was spending summers at Bougival, when Eugène had rented a house with a beautiful garden, which she delighted in painting. Nini, her niece, and little Julie appeared in paintings, drawings and etchings of those summers.

Eugène Manet and his Daughter at Bougival is a glorious example of her work.

She was not ambitious and noted that “Desire for glorification after death seems to me an excessive ambition. Mine would be just to capture something of the passing moment.”

The critics were never so severe with her as with her male counterparts. They praised her “light unpretentious style”, her “extraordinary sensibility, and a skill and technique which place her in the forefront of the Impressionist group”. Pissarro referred to her as “this distinguished woman, who had such a splendid feminine talent, and who brought honour to our Impressionist group.”