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(PULSATING THEME MUSIC)

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Cassatt is a very difficult artist.

There is something difficult and ugly about her work

that is for me as a scholar very intriguing.

Makes me want to look more, makes me want to understand more.

She frustrates a lot of people,

and I wanna understand that frustration.

There's something challenging about her work that keeps me looking,

keeps me coming back.

Women have been making art as long as art has been being made,

but they have simply been boxed out institutionally.

Looking at her art and looking at her work

and her thinking,

it tells us a lot about our ideas about womanhood

and challenges our ideas about gender

and women and what they're capable of.

I have a very special relationship to this painting.

It's such an ambiguous painting in some way, and it's so intriguing,

and whenever I started looking at it, I always felt like

there was something I wasn't getting, something was missing.

So, when I came to the gallery

to work in the department of French paintings,

it was really because I wanted to understand this painting

and what it tells us about Cassatt as an artist

and as a political thinker.

(REFLECTIVE PIANO MUSIC)

Mary Stevenson Cassatt was born in 1844 in Allegheny City,

part of modern Pittsburgh,

to a very distinguished family of French and Irish descent.

Her parents met and married in Pittsburgh,

which was a bustling transportation hub.

If you travelled up the Mississippi to the Ohio to Pittsburgh,

you could get practically any product in the country

to the Northeast.

And that's exactly what her father did.

He was what was called a forwarding merchant.

His company would buy these goods

and then resell them to factories in the Northeast.

That was a very lucrative profession.

And her mother was the daughter of the first president

of the Pittsburgh National Bank.

So her father was the king of Pittsburgh in that sense,

and she grew up the princess.

They had investment in their DNA.

They prospered in that area and then moved out.

They arrived in Philadelphia.

They were definitely part of an educated

and wealthy community in the city that was the centre of the art world

in the United States in the 1850s and '60s.

Her parents are friends with collectors,

some of the best collectors in the United States at the time,

and you can imagine a young girl,

a young teenager going to their homes

and being exposed to these small collections of excellent art.

She knew that she wanted to become an artist,

having had that experience as a young woman,

and then seeking out a place in Philadelphia

where she could train professionally.

She knew what she wanna do,

and she knew the direction that she had to take.

So when she was 15,

she signed up for classes at the Pennsylvania Academy

in Philadelphia.

ANNA: It was only beginning in the 1840s that women could study

at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

There was a group of very few women in Philadelphia

that would have been in the 1860s

thinking about a professional career as artists.

Women artists would not have been something

she would have been exposed to a lot.

So there was no real model for her

for women artists exhibiting portraits

or history paintings

or landscapes or anything like that in Philadelphia.

The ambitious teenager yearned for a more independent artistic community

and unlimited access to the very best art.

Once the American Civil war had ended in 1865,

Cassatt wasted little time in boarding the transatlantic steamer

to Europe. Escorted by her mother,

the 21-year-old arrived in Paris just before Christmas.

For the wealthy, Paris under Napoleon III was an exciting place to be.

Many Americans lived in the city,

providing the Cassatts access to an established social scene of parties

and dinners.

The city's architecture was undergoing regeneration

as Paris showed its prosperity to the world through its decorative arts

and material culture.

One of the biggest things for her was going to the Louvre.

She went daily to the Louvre.

She was a registered student, and she would go

and basically just absorb the old masters like a sponge.

She thought that was very, very important.

There actually was quite a community of women in Paris

that would often take lodgings together

and that would be painting at the Louvre,

hire models maybe share the costs of models.

And then, of course, the great goal

of all of that painting was to have your work exhibited at the Salon.

The Salon was an annual exhibition, every spring in Paris,

essentially the big event of the art world.

This was a moment when private dealers were only starting

to gain ground. So if you wanted to sell your work,

the Salon was really the key place.

But cracks in the Salon system were beginning to show.

Many artists accused the French government,

which indirectly controlled the Salon selection jury,

of being overly strict

and conservative in the face of changing artistic styles.

Feeling the need to expand her education,

in February 1867,

Cassatt decided to leave the formal class environment of the city

and head to the countryside.

She sought teaching from Thomas Couture,

renowned as Edouard Manet's master,

and went on to educate herself in genre painting

by living in an artist's colony in the small village of Ecouen,

north of Paris.

Couture, at the time, was considered a bit of a rebel,

and he lived outside of Paris in this countryside

where a lot of genre painters had set up shop.

He was classically trained,

but his style was softer

and more lively.

Lots of stories, peasant life,

charming, exotic,

that kind of thing.

It was amongst this colony of artists that she found the inspiration

for one of her first canvases...

The Mandolin Player, painted in 1868.

It is one of the very few Cassatt works that survive

from her early career.

Her first work to be accepted into the Salon,

The Mandolin Player, is really more in a Couture style.

It's peasant life,

it's genre, quote unquote,

but it is more monumental.

It's a painting that shows potential.

There aren't many early works from Cassatt,

partly by misfortune and partly by design. In her later years,

she talks in her correspondence about wanting to destroy things.

This is not uncommon. Artists oftentimes get rid of things.

She just did not want those to be the works that she's remembered for.

Despite early success,

Cassatt's next few submissions to the Salon were rejected.

Then, in 1870,

the Franco-Prussian war broke out.

Over the next eight months, the city was devastated by siege

and then civil war.

Many thousands chose to flee.

Cassatt was among them and packed up her paintings

and left for the safety of Philadelphia.

Back in her homeland, Cassatt tried to sell work,

desperate to prove to her family that painting could be her career.

She sent two works to a dealer in New York and got rejected.

She sought commissions in Pittsburgh with no success.

She did get her works displayed in Chicago,

but they burned in the Great Chicago Fire.

All of this served to convince Cassatt that she belonged in Europe.

A fortuitous meeting with a priest and a new friend,

the artist Emily Sartain,

led to a change in her luck.

While she was in Pittsburgh,

she apparently got the priest of the Catholic cathedral

to commission her to do a copy of a Correggio painting

in Parma in Italy,

and Emily wanted to go to Europe,

and it turned out to be a great experience for both of them.

They were able to study with some of the major teachers in Parma

and also see the art in Italy,

primarily Correggio.

But instead of working on the copies she had been commissioned for,

Cassatt began enthusiastically working on a picture of her own.

What I love about this painting is how it really demonstrates

how Cassatt was able to bring together

both the lessons of the old masters and the incredible attention

that she gives too to the modern pictorial lessons

that she's learning from having spent time in Paris.

In 1872, Cassatt is around 28 years old.

She had a childhood travelling throughout Europe.

But her real immersion in European art really begins

when she starts to travel through Italy,

especially in Parma and Rome,

and then later in Spain, especially in Seville.

She's carefully studying Correggio in Parma

and we can really see the influence of Correggio here

and everything that she would have been absorbing in the galleries,

in all of the cathedrals.

She's chosen an impossibly tricky composition here

with this position of the figure in the foreground.

If you look at where her arm begins at her shoulder,

it's coming out into space, then doubling back on itself,

and then her hand finally is coming back yet again,

this third serpentine line.

She's challenging herself to have more complicated compositions

than she's ever dealt with before.

The quality of the painting is remarkable.

She's able to modulate her brush work so rapidly

between the rough execution of the flowers as they're falling,

which really gives a sense of motion

and energy and activity

versus the incredible fine-ness with which the faces are painted.

We can see her absorbing the early lessons of figural realism,

certainly the lessons of Caravaggio and the Mannerists.

But we can also see her looking closely at Manet,

who was also interested in these dark portrait spaces,

the space of the studio.

At the same time, we can see her dedication to the figure

as her most beloved subject.

So she's terribly interested in not only the history of European art

but also what's becoming popular in Paris at the time.

Cassatt continued to travel throughout Europe,

absorbing and studying every genre of art

and Old Master painting she could find.

In 1874, after her European jaunt,

she returns to Paris, and that's where she settles herself,

and she actually remains more or less in Paris until her death,

apart from a very occasional trips to the US

and other parts of France.

She'd realised by that point that she needed to be in Paris,

both for the proximity to the Salon

and the opportunity to show her work there,

but also because it was it was such a growing art community,

so it is essential for her to be there, to make contacts

with other artists, to get to know dealers

and to sell her work.

She, at that point, was needing to support herself.

There many exciting things happening in the world of art.

Particularly with the First Impressionist's Exhibition in 1874,

and I think Cassatt was certainly meeting other artists

and having a variety of different experiences.

So there's really great dynamic art going on. But at the same time,

the restrictions that she'd been experiencing with the Salon jury,

with the conservativism that she saw going on

was increasingly frustrating.

She was not being able to make her mark. She couldn't break through.

"When I came to live in Paris,

"after having painted in Rome and other places,

"the sight of the annual exhibitions quite led me astray.

"I thought I must be wrong and the painters admired by the public right.

"It was then I fell in with our band

and took quite another direction."

Her multiple entries to the Salon received a mixed reception

from the juries.

In 1874,

one work of hers caught the eye of someone

who was to change the course of her professional life.

Edgar Degas saw it.

The story that's been told is Degas purportedly told a friend,

"There is someone who feels as I do."

He put it in terms of sensibility,

that there is someone who is a kindred spirit,

who sort of understands things and feels the way I do.

And unfortunately, because of the timing,

she was not in Paris for the first impressionist show,

so she did not see it, but she would see his art.

The story she recounts is seeing one of his pastels in a shop window.

"I used to go and flatten my nose against that window

"and absorb all I could of his art.

"I saw art then as I wanted to see it."

It absolutely hit her between the eyes.

She was absolutely wowed by it.

She had never seen anything quite like this before.

His handling of colour,

the bending and twisting forms of the little dancers of Montmartre,

this was a very, very unusual,

and she was absolutely fascinated.

It takes until 1877 when they finally meet,

and suddenly the whole trajectory of her career changes.

Cassatt, over the course of the next couple of years,

would get to know Degas personally,

and of course both of them were rooted in painting figures,

both were very well educated.

So they had this sort of strong sense of the art of the past

but were very keen to break away from that.

Degas was very involved in inviting new artists to join the exhibitions

that have become known as the Impressionists exhibitions.

At that time, they were really known as a group of independent artists,

and they really preferred to be called the Independents.

And it took Cassatt two years from Degas' invitation

to join the Impressionist exhibition for her to make that decision,

that she would break from the Salon and exhibit with the Impressionists.

"In 1877, I submitted again to the Salon.

"They rejected it.

"That was when Degas made me promise never to submit anything

"to the Salon again, and to exhibit with his friends

"in the group of the Impressionists.

"I agreed gladly.

"At last I could work absolutely independently

"without worrying about the possible opinion of a jury!

"I had already acknowledged who my true masters were.

"I admired Manet, Courbet and Degas.

"I hated conventional art.

"I was beginning to live."

When you look at the Little Girl in a Blue Armchair,

you can see Impressionism.

You can see it in the handling of the paint,

the fluidity of it,

the cropping of the composition, the sort of very curious space,

the way the floor is slightly tilted up.

The chairs are arranged oddly.

But at the same time, it's very realist.

When you look at the little girl in particular,

the way she sort of literally is flopped on the chair

and her arms and legs akimbo.

This is a tired, bored, annoyed little girl.

She's just thrown herself on a couch.

It's very minimal.

Cassatt isn't working on the little details.

There's actually very little in that room,

and it is meant to be a traditional bourgeois Paris interior.

She just focuses on the figures,

the dynamism of the colour

and the brushwork and the truth of the painting.

When you look back at it, it doesn't feel radical.

It was radical for her,

and we know from a letter Cassatt wrote many years later, in 1903,

she talked about how that painting had been rejected

for the World's Fair in 1878, and she was particularly mad

because Degas had liked it,

and Degas had worked on the background.

And that's very important because it really sort of shows that by 1878,

they're working together.

Cultural life in Paris was transforming.

Opera and theatre had become a major pastime.

(HOOVES CLIP, CLOP)

Attracted as much by the culture of display...

..the dazzling outfits and opulent spaces,

the old and newly monied classes went to view the entertainment

off the stage, as much as on it.

(GENTLE PIANO MUSIC)

The architecture of the recently built opera house

and many of the theatres encouraged this process of seeing

and being seen,

especially from the numerous small balconies

from where one could study the city's fashionable elite.

For the Impressionists, it was to be a rich source of inspiration

for their depictions of modern life.

Cassatt enters her first Impressionist exhibition in 1879.

She sends in 11 works, paintings and pastels.

We think about this being her debut

with this group of independent artists that, in fact,

one of the core subjects that she exhibits there are young women,

perhaps making some of their debut in society and going to theatre.

And so it's a whole series of images in which

you see women enjoying the theatre,

looking out, perhaps at the performance,

maybe hiding a little bit behind fans and other instances.

There's something not only about going out to see performance,

but, and this is what's so important for Cassatt,

there's this duality of seeing and being seen,

and that's what's so potent in her paintings

is that you get a real sense of the visibility of particularly women.

With In the Loge you have this great triangulation of gazes.

The woman at the theatre,

and you can tell this is not while things are going on on stage.

The house lights are up. It's glaringly bright,

and yet she's looking so intensely

and intently through her opera glasses.

She's observing one of the other audience members.

And of course, at the same time, far off in the distance,

you see a man leaning over the balcony,

just staring so intently through his own pair of binoculars at her.

And that has this effect of sort of triggering this awareness

that we're doing the exact same thing.

And yet Cassatt's brilliance is that this figure

is completely unaffected by this.

She isn't concerned with how she's being seen.

She's concerned with her own looking,

to which we, no matter how hard we look,

we don't have access to it.

And that's confounding and frustrating.

Woman with a Pearl Necklace is most likely a portrait of her sister,

Lydia, who was one of her favourite subjects.

There's something about her red hair

and this complexion that she has that is so striking

and so singular that Cassatt herself shares.

She had this very rusty red hair.

And so there's something so brazen about her depiction of Lydia

with this big smile on her face.

It was still very rare to have a woman smiling like that

and not in a way that's sort of pleasant and polite

but that is truly joyful,

of pleasure, which feels a little intimate

and almost a little scandalising,

especially with that dress that is draped off her shoulders.

And if we needed to be reminded of her of her bare skin,

it's reflected in the mirror behind her.

You can see her bare back.

The thing about that show was, it actually was a success.

The 1879 Impressionist show was really the first one to make money,

and she did get good notices from the critics for the most part.

They talked about Miss Cassatt, they talked about her originality,

so it proved finally that she was on the right path,

that people were taking notice and complimenting her work.

Cassatt showed as many prints as pastels

and oil paintings in the 5th Impressionist Exhibition in 1880,

including unfinished works,

which shocked the critics.

Undeterred, her productivity continued to flourish,

as did her professional success

and she began to make sales

through the Impressionists' tenacious dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel.

The shifting status, confidence

and economic opportunities for women at the end of the century

led to the phrase "New Woman",

a subject that Cassatt embraced in her work.

When you look at her interior scenes,

they don't seem modern to our eyes,

they seem very conservative, very old fashioned,

but what's striking about them is Cassatt as a woman,

how she perceives these scenes.

This is the sphere in which she lived as a woman

of her social class, a woman who was unmarried.

She had limits placed on her by society

where was appropriate for her to go.

So the world that she had were areas like the home,

even though she never had children of her own,

that was the world she inhabited.

And so she would focus on the interaction.

The psychology of the people.

She is very skilled at communicating the internal life

through the external within that sphere

because it's very easy to think

that there was nothing else behind the eyes.

They're pretty. They care for the home,

but they're ultimately vapid and have no intellectual life.

And Cassatt, of course, knew perfectly well

that women had tremendous intellect,

tremendous thought capability.

And she wanted to tease that out in her art

to show how the personalities of these people

and the fact that they are thinking,

complex individuals, I think, is really what makes her art so modern.

(GENTLE PIANO MUSIC)

Five O'Clock Tea is a very funny picture,

and it was detested by critics because it was so funny,

because it was so bizarre,

because it defies a lot of rules.

There's this tension between intimacy

and inaccessibility

because, on the one hand, this is a very feminine space of interaction,

of a domestic form of socialising.

And yet the two figures that she paints are completely checked out.

One of them is looking off in the other, totally other direction.

She's not even looking at her guest.

And the woman who's sitting directly across from us has lifted her teacup

to block her face so we can't see her.

When we think about the history of painting portraits

or figure painting, it's all about the face.

It's all about what we can see on somebody's face

and how we read an expression. And Cassatt has cut us off.

She is denying us that privilege,

which is what makes that painting so frustrating.

She's certainly a beautiful and talented painter,

but she doesn't make things easy on us.

There was a tradition in late 19th-century French painting

of showing women reading.

So in that sense, Cassatt is taking on a familiar subject.

She shows her mother wearing glasses,

holding this newspaper,

and we very infrequently see women reading newspapers

in paintings of this period. They're more often reading novels

or even reading illustrated journals.

Figaro is a paper that was very much about politics.

It was about the economy but really complex social issues.

The fact Cassatt has so firmly put that paper in her mother's hands,

I think is making quite a powerful statement about both her mother

as an individual but also about the increasing engagement

that you see with women in politics of the day

or even women sort of entering professions of law and medicine.

She has all these women who are incredibly serious that she paints.

They're always absorbed in whatever they're doing,

whether that's reading or sewing

or knitting or playing the banjo or drawing.

And there is never a moment that she ever has to defend the idea

that women's work is serious work,

that women's lives are serious lives.

It wouldn't have occurred to her that it needed to be articulated,

because it was simply true.

It was simply a fact,

which makes it almost all the more powerful.

In 1879, 1880, you could go to the impressionist exhibitions,

and everybody was there.

Monet was there, Morisot was there, Degas was there,

and you could see a connection between their styles.

There was an energy and an experimentation.

But by the early '80s,

all the artists are searching for a kind of Anti-Impressionist style

that is also experimental

but is seemingly more eternal.

People like Gauguin, Van Gogh

and Cezanne were getting into their mature Post-Impressionist styles,

and Cassatt was doing that too.

At the age of 42,

Cassatt was about to start a new chapter as an independent artist.

(GENTLE PIANO MUSIC)

Woman Arranging Her Hair is actually,

I think, one of the great triumphs of Mary Cassatt's career.

The subject matter, Woman at Her Toilette, has a long tradition.

What's interesting is having a woman portraying a woman

at her toilette, so it brings, you know,

a very personal understanding to the subject.

What's interesting is the model is not conventionally pretty.

She's actually arguably quite homely with a slightly buck tooth.

But Cassatt makes her beautiful.

When you look at the line of her arm,

the way she's arranging the hair...

..the pattern on the wallpaper,

every single element contributes to creating this beautiful tableau.

I think the main distinction in how Cassatt approaches an image

of a toilette or coiffure is she doesn't sexualise it.

When a male artist does it, invariably

there'll be lots of flesh on display.

It's titillating. It's a painting by a man for a male audience.

Cassatt's paintings are not intended to be sexual.

In many ways, they're very mundane,

part of a woman's daily practice,

is something that she does every day.

It's trivial and banal.

The beauty comes from the way it's portrayed,

the way it's composed, the colours that she uses.

She does not want to titillate.

She does not want to provoke a response.

During the mid-19th century,

Western art saw the birth of Japonisme,

a term that referred to the European craze for Japanese culture.

At a time when artists were rejecting the traditional style of art,

the Japanese aesthetic seemed like a breath of fresh air.

Artists like Cassatt and her peers loved the stylisation

and the flat bold colours inspiring them to try new compositions,

themes and techniques.

In April 1890,

a major exhibition of Japanese woodcut prints opened

at Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

Hundreds of Ukiyo-e prints showing scenes of everyday Japanese life

in vibrant colours and bold designs.

Profoundly moved by the spectacle of colour

and craftmanship she had witnessed at the exhibition,

Cassatt immersed herself into a printing project

that would consume all of her time an energy for the next nine months.

A series of colour prints showing scenes

from the lives of modern women,

that would become among the most valuable prints of the 19th century.

(CALMING MUSIC)

The colour on the ten separate images

that create this suite of prints are remarkable,

and there's a lot of variation among even prints of the same subject.

She is fine tuning, she's applying colour to the plates by hand.

And each colour has to be applied on a separate plate.

So it's an incredibly sophisticated

and very complex, multi-layered process.

And we know that she is experimenting

and fine tuning the colours on her own.

But when it comes time to print the full edition of these colour prints,

and in order to produce 25 copies of each of each image,

she works with a professional printer at the time, Leroy.

Working at full speed, the two of them together,

printer and artist are able to create about eight

or nine impressions a day.

In the end, in the final edition of the prints,

she names the printer as well as herself. So she says,

"Printed by Mary Cassatt and Leroy,

"edition of 25," and then signs it Mary Cassatt.

Her prints were wildly successful, and she knew it,

she was such a smart manipulator of her own market.

She knew what was going to sell.

She decided to only sell the set of ten as a set.

She didn't want to split it off.

This, first of all, guarantees she's going to make more money,

because she's selling as sets, but also sort of creates some demand

or mystique that these prints can only be seen together as a set.

She was a very keen manipulator of her own market in that in that way.

Cassatt was deeply dedicated to the American suffrage movement,

even though she was living in France,

and she had very strident beliefs about the rights of women

and was often corresponding with her American friends

about the importance of the suffrage movement.

There's a wonderful letter that Cassatt writes in the 1890s

about why she feels she'll never return to the United States,

and it's because she feels that she can be much freer in France.

And she says, "Only in France am I being taken seriously as a person

"and not being treated because of my gender."

She writes that women need to be able to have a vote.

They need to be able to have a say in what's going on

in the geopolitical realities that they're living in.

They have to be able to help determine

not only their own future but the future of everybody.

(LIGHT PIANO MUSIC)

For Cassatt, the mother and child subject

is one that she returns to again

and again in the last decades of her career.

It's a moment when there are great debates.

The International Women's Congress is being formed,

and there's many conversations about women's roles in raising children,

great efforts to try to reduce infant mortality at the time.

Women of all classes are being encouraged

to spend more time with their children.

When you think about, like, The Child's Bath, of 1893,

the great painting in Chicago,

it is capturing the moment in which a mother has a child in her lap,

and it is very much about engagement.

There's a great sense of touch that comes out in that picture,

not only from the sense of the various textiles

and the textures there from the woman's garment

but also the touch between the mother and the child.

I don't think it was always a very happy

or comfortable experience to be in Cassatt's studio,

because there are some stories about children getting scolded by Cassatt,

because they're not doing what she wants them to do.

And there's one account of a baby that actually cried itself to sleep

because it was so frustrated with the experience of modelling for her,

and that she decided then to depict the child sleeping.

Children will never sit still, they are fussy,

and they get bored, and they get cranky,

and that's something that she doesn't shy away from depicting.

This radical honesty about what it's like to ask a child

to sit still and pose.

Cassatt paints children as the difficult

and complicated beings that they are.

I think one of the challenges with Cassatt's mother

and children subjects is that she did do it over a such a long period

of time, and they've been used so often on greeting cards

or for the Mother's Day cards today

that I think we've become so familiar with them

that we've stopped in a way looking at them.

We think of her perhaps only as painting mothers and children,

and perhaps we are less familiar with also some

of the references she's recalling of centuries of tradition

of painting the Madonna and child.

They always start out saying,

"Well, but she wasn't married and she didn't have any children.

"So how is she qualified to paint the subject?"

which of course is totally ridiculous because Raphael,

Michelangelo, you know, all of those childless, unmarried men,

everyone's perfectly happy to have THEM painting mothers and children.

However, they were immensely popular.

In terms of Durand-Ruel taking her on,

this became a gold mine for him

because she just couldn't do enough of them.

They always had a ready buyer.

People lined up to get her next one.

She later on complained about that

because she said, "I was led astray by the dealers."

I think in some ways, she is a victim of her own success.

Those works were immensely popular. They sold very well,

both in prints and paintings. They were highly coveted,

but it's also lead over time to this kind of reduction of her abilities,

that when you pick up any art history textbook,

they will show you a mother and child,

and that is all they will show you.

And over time, that's all people know about her,

and it's tragically has minimalised her importance.

It sort of sidelined her

because she seems like she's a one-trick pony,

that she only can do one thing.

And there's a whole body of work that's complex

and dynamic and experimental and audacious.

Cassatt's reputation as one of America's great artists

reached its height in the new century,

as her pictures were being hung in galleries around the world.

And in her adopted home,

she was awarded the coveted Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur,

the highest French distinction for civil accomplishments.

Now in her 60s and having purchased a chateau of her own,

Cassatt's productivity continued unabated as both artist

and advisor.

She was incredibly influential as almost a dealer

and a promoter of getting the Impressionists

into American collections.

So by encouraging her friend, Louisine Havemeyer,

to meet European impressionists

and then getting that artwork back into the United States,

Mary Cassatt and Havemeyer basically formed some of the major collections

of art in the United States.

When you talk about her legacy in American art history,

her career as a painter and printmaker

versus the sort of side career she had as an adviser to collectors

and not only bringing in Impressionist paintings

and guiding rich Americans to buy the impressionists

but also old Master paintings.

I don't know if you can actually argue that one is more important

than the other in the grand scheme,

because what she did was phenomenal

and the fact that she could do two things simultaneously,

create amazing works of art

but also help to support and encourage

and form collections that would go on to be the basis of museums

across the country, is phenomenal,

so people may not understand that aspect as easily,

because they don't see on a name,

"Mary Cassatt advised the collector who bought this painting,

"who then donated to the museum." That's sort of the secret history.

But her fingerprints are all through American collections

in ways that people may not even know.

By the outbreak of World War I,

Cassatt's triumphs became clouded by personal tragedy.

Devastated by the deaths of Degas,

Renoir and her remaining siblings,

she was also forced to flee her home

for the safety of the south of France.

Cassatt's eyesight deteriorated over the next decade

to the point of being unable to work.

Her last works were brightly-coloured pastels of women and children.

She stopped painting entirely in 1914.

In 1915, Cassatt's long-standing friend, Louisine Havermeyer,

staged a New York exhibition of work by Cassatt and Degas,

alongside her collection of old Master paintings.

Giving her full support,

Cassatt sent every single work that was still in her possession.

All proceeds from the entry fees

and sales founded the Woman Suffrage Campaign Fund.

Among the 18 works by Cassatt in the exhibition

was Woman with a Sunflower.

This painting here in the collection of the National Gallery was one

that I became instantly attracted to because it was so ambiguous.

It's a painting that because of its prominence in the collection

has been remarked upon quite a bit

but was always written off as a sentimental image of a woman

and a child, and in fact, when the painting entered the collection

of the National Gallery, it was retitled Mother and Child.

What kept nagging in my mind about this painting

was that there was this enormous sunflower

that it's so central to her composition,

and yet I couldn't figure out what it was doing there.

I was reading the minutes from the annual convention

of the National American Women's Suffrage Association

and noticed that there was a sunflower

on the cover of their pamphlet.

And as it turns out, in the 1890s,

the NAWSA adopted the Sunflower as their official symbol.

And she paints this around 1905,

when she's really beginning to devote herself

to the movement of feminism and of suffrage.

This was never something that had ever been drawn out in scholarship,

and the original title of the painting

in French was La femme au tournesol,

which means "the Woman with the Sunflower",

and was hanging here under the title Mother and Child.

There was a conference at American University,

the Feminist Art History Conference,

and I came down from New York to present this research about Cassatt,

criticising the National Gallery of Art

for displaying this painting under a title

that covers up the original intent and meaning of the painting.

But luckily the head of French painting here was very excited

to learn of my research and told me that I had to absolutely come work

on the painting, and the title has now been restored

to its original title of Woman with a Sunflower.

Mary Cassatt died on 14th June, 1926,

in her Chateau Beaufresne at the age of 82.

If ever there was a truer artist,

it was Mary Cassatt.

Always steering towards the highest ideals,

undaunted and unflinching,

her hand upon the tiller,

she has kept true to her course

through all the storms of adverse criticism,

of raillery and discouragement.

"I have touched with a sense of art some people...

"..they felt the love and the life.

"Can you offer me anything to compare to that joy for an artist?"

(REFLECTIVE PIANO MUSIC)

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