Mary Cassatt: A Life - Softcover

Mathews, Nancy Mowll

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300077548 ISBN 13: 9780300077544

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1998

Synopsis

One of the few women Impressionists, Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) had a life of paradoxes: American born, she lived and worked in France; a classically trained artist, she preferred the company of radicals; never married, she painted exquisite and beloved portraits of mothers and children. This book provides new insight into the personal life and artistic endeavors of this extraordinary woman.

“Brilliant, lively life of long lived American Impressionist.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Rich in historical and archeological detail, thoroughgoing in its resurrection of the contexts and conditions of Cassatt’s life as an artist.”—Carol Armstrong, New York Times Book Review

“Mathews informatively and entertainingly documents Cassatt’s tumultuous relations with various members of both the American and Parisian avant-garde. . . . An impressive biography.”—Siri Huntoon, New York Newsday

 “A superb piece of scholarship.”—Ruth Johnstone Wales, Christian Science Monitor

 “In this admirable biography, art historian Mathews . . . presents a compelling portrait of this contradictory woman.”—Publishers Weekly

 “Authoritative, unsentimental, clear as a bell, this is a model of the new biography by and about talented women.”—Kennedy Fraser

 “This will probably be the definitive biography for our generation.”—John Wilmerding, Princeton University

About this title

About the Author

Nancy Mowll Mathews is the Eugénie Prendergast Curator at Williams College Museum of Art.

From Kirkus Reviews

Brilliant, lively life of long-lived American Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), by the editor of her selected letters and author of a monograph on her (neither reviewed here). Mathews's historical considerations of Cassatt, showing how the painter has fared with art critics and feminist writers through the decades since her entries were first accepted by the Paris Salon in 1872, reveal just how surreal public and critical understanding of a painter can be, with Cassatt seen in the guises of a half-dozen different roles--from Victorian spinster to torch- bearing feminist--and each rippling image seen as the real woman. Trained in Pennsylvania and the Paris atelier of Charles Chaplin, Cassatt made an early decision never to accept a marriage proposal, preferring the life of the artist to that of the wife; nor, apparently, did she ever enter into a lesbian tie, though these were not uncommon among French painters. Cassatt was early recognized for her forceful opinions and the intense intellectual stimulation of her company. She led a romantic, nomadic life in France until turning professional and taking up her own studio in Paris. She welcomed the invitation by Degas to join the Impressionists and, though she met few of the outstanding members of that group, enjoyed matching wits with the fast tongues of those she did meet. Cassatt gave up her earlier melancholy, yearning, and contemplative subject matter for the modern psychological depth of Degas and Manet. With the waning of the Impressionists a decade later, she came into her prime and brought an abstract originality to her sensuous compositions of mothers and children. Her taste influenced many major American art collections, though cataracts deprived her of sight during her final years. Quiet but uplifting. (Illustrated throughout with 130 b&w photos) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0300077548
• ISBN 13: 9780300077544
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 400