Original subtitles

America sat is only one of a handful of women artists up to the beginning of the 20th century

who've managed to forge strong reputations in the male-dominated saga of art history.

She was an American by birth but lived in France for 60 years and helped to develop the first

great movement in modern art, impressionism.

Her background was privileged, but are interesting depicting modern life and are openness

to the techniques and ideas of radical artists was immense.

America sat was born in May 1843 in Allegheny City, just across the river from Pittsburgh.

Her father was a wealthy banker who became the city's mayor shortly after Mary's birth.

The Cassat family occupied two social worlds, that of the old colonial American aristocracy,

and the new entrepreneurial capitalist society that was emerging with the industrialized

nation, and consequently Mary was socially confident, financially comfortable, and culturally

aware from an early age. In 1849, the Cassat family moved here to Philadelphia,

the American city that would be most closely associated with Mary Cassat.

And over the next few years, a pattern was established that would determine the nature of

the rest of her life, because within two years the family had to travel to Europe, mainly because

Robert, Mary's brother, was very ill. They spent time in Paris, and then in Hyruleburg

and Darmstadt, where the 13-year-old boy finally died, and then the family came back to Philadelphia.

And in this cultivated city that at the time was the second largest in the United States,

Mary began to discover what it was she wanted to be.

Cassat seems to have made the decision that she wanted to be an artist,

when she was just 15 and a year later, in 1860, she enrolled in the illustrious

Pennsylvania Academy for Fine Arts, America's first art school in Museum.

It was only over the previous century in Europe that women had even begun to be allowed to become

members of art academies, and by no means all. And in certain respects, the Pennsylvania

Academy was an enlightened institution, which offered its numerous female students,

the same education that its male ones received, drawing from castes and copying old masters,

as well as working with models. Cassat, though, was disparaging,

complaining that she spent too much time drawing animals, cows she claimed.

In addition, although a basic training was adequate, women students still face the local art

world whose museums, dealers and collectors, expected women to be society portraits are best.

In 1865, with the American Civil War still raging, Cassat made the inevitable decision

to come to Europe to study more serious as an artist. And so, even though her father was very

much against it, together with her mother, she set sail on what effectively was an artistic

grand tour, and her first stop was here in Paris. Now, she later said that Paris was the kind of place

that a woman could do serious work and be recognized for it, although it's worth reminding

ourselves that an artist supposedly as radical as Renoir was soon to say that women lawyers and

festers were like five-legged calves, but the women artists were merely ridiculous.

Now, the place she should have come to was this. Their cold elbows are the most illustrious art

school in Paris and therefore, one of the great art schools of the world. But of course,

it was man-only. So instead, she approached one of the newly appointed professors, a man called

Jean-Leon Girôme, and became his pupil on a one-to-one basis in his studio, but her real place

learning was just a few hundred metres down the way over the river. Here, in the greatest museum

in the world, the Louvre, Cassat joined the ranks of Eegean artists who scurried around with

sketchbooks or set up their easels in order to study the phenomenal collections there.

But the Louvre was just one illustrious part of the Parisian art world. The place where

reputations were made or broken was the annual states-apported salon, a showcase for contemporary art,

which increasingly formed an international centre for artists, dealers, and collectors.

Cassat exhibited this picture, the mandolin player, at the salon, in 1868. It's a touching

slightly sentimental but direct image of a peasant girl making music, and it seems to have been deemed

above average by the jury, who hung it at eye line on the walls, which were otherwise filled

from floor to ceiling. Fired up by her modest success, Cassat submitted once again a year later,

but was rejected and told a friend she felt humiliated. After a brief visit to Rome with her mother,

the Franco-Prussian War force Cassat back home in 1870.

After a few months back in America, of course, Cassat wants to travel back to Europe,

where things have calmed down, but a parents are very reluctant to let her go. So much so that they

weren't given a funding. However, she decides to find her own means of funding the trip. So

she goes to Pittsburgh where she has a meeting with the Catholic Bishop there, and he commissions her

to make some copies for the cathedral in Pittsburgh of work by an Italian manorist master called

Coregio. And these works are in the Italian city of Palmer, and with this commission, that's where

she goes. The beginnings have another big extensive trip around Europe. And she spends about

eight months in the city, and she makes these copies, she earns her money, and then she starts to

explore the art of the Italian 17th and 18th century, which starts to inform her own paintings,

of which this is perhaps the best example. That's quite interesting, because I dilemma, even in her

family about her painting, they wanted to be a portrait painter. That's more respectable. She wants

to paint broader bigger pictures. And in this work, she uses a portrait format to produce an image

called the Vicante, which has classical undertones, and it's a picture of a woman who's one of

the followers of Bakus, the god of wine and frenzy and celebration. And these women make noises,

they cut animals up, they party, they drink. And it's as if she's working her way through

aspects of European art history, with a little nod to Caravaggio, who painted Bakin alien subjects,

and began really this marked contrast of light and dark in European painting. There's also

something of the experimentalist here, though, in early cassette, because she has this rather brutal

crop on the arm, which if you look close to it, you can see it was intended, you can see where

painting ends, and the canvas, or the prime canvas begins. But what you, I think, get from this painting

most strongly, is not just an artist who's searching for her own style, but in a rather quiet,

subtle way, she's trying to make her own noise. Cassat returned to Paris, renting a studio at

19 rural La Valle, and began to move away from the European old masters towards the radically

young masters of her own day. The story goes that Cassat was wandering up the boulevard

houseman looking at the art in the gallery windows when her eye was caught by a series of vivid

fluid pastels. It changed my life, she later wrote. I saw art then as I wanted to see it,

because this was the work of Edgar Degger, one of the leading lights in the first radical movement

in modern art, known as Impressionism. Impressionism had come to public prominence in 1874

when a painting by Claude Monne, called Impression's Sunrise, had been ridiculed by French critics.

Their subject matter was modern life, train stations, streets, people at play, and their

techniques were experimental, trying to capture the fleeting sensations of light. Equally

crucial for Cassat was the fact that they'd been regularly rejected from the salons so much so

that they'd set up their own exhibitions. Cassat's desire to be involved in the Impressionist

movement is growing evident in this painting, called Presaicli, but accurately little girl in

the blue armchair. When you look at it first of all, you're struck by the increasing braviora

and looseness of the brushstrokes, particularly those that define the armchair. There's something

quite brave about Cassat's decision to paint the little girl with a tartan rug and a cushion

behind it against this rather busy backdrop, but it gives the surface a real sense of animation.

However, rather than just have the compressed and slightly claustrophobic structure or format,

Cassat's favorite to this point in a career, she opens up the space, so the chairs take her eyes

on a kind of cyclical motion around the surface of the canvas, and the background, she was

helped by a dego, not least, in the gray areas here, but also in painting the light that streams

through the windows in the back. Perhaps Cassat let him do so because she needed to be part of the

Impressionist milieu, but it also shows a generosity of spirit that you might not always find

in male artists with big egos. But actually all the energy and sophistication comes from Cassat.

The crucial point there of this painting is its mood and its subject matter. There's a lovely

gentle humour in the painting, not least, with the dog, which is a Belgian Griffon, and Cassat

had these dogs ever since she discovered them in 1873 in Brussels. They remain with her throughout

her life, but there's something slightly comical about the dog whose eye just seems to be opening

as it sits on the armchair next to the little girl, and in a way there's a kind of pictorial

rhythm there, it's a balance in a painting that is otherwise asymmetrical, she's off centre,

but of course the key figure is the girl. Now there's no such thing as an accident in painting,

the crucial point is why or how we choose to interpret what the painting gives us. If this were

by a male artist, that pose with a girl fully frontal, legs slightly apart, would be seen as

very provocative. With Cassat, I'm not so sure though, I think she's looking at something

rather different. Look at the pose of the child slumped in this armchair. She's comfortable,

you can see that from the background, she's comfortable in every sense, she's a bourgeois kid,

but that's the key point I think. Rather than, as in a lot of paintings of children,

showing them as slightly sentimentalised or cutesy, or as little ladies on the verge of becoming adults,

what Cassatty's focusing on is entirely natural. It's that slightly languid boredom that kids have,

and in a way it makes the image more universal. Cassat was now in early 30s, childless,

and partly forced to be a child again when her parents and sister arrived in Paris,

effectively forcing her to give up her studio alone and live with the family. But the family

was also to inspire her art, featuring in a scenes of daily life from the period,

such as this picture, reading La Figaro, which is a portrait of a mother, Catherine.

It's a contemporary image of an intellectually astute and well-informed woman,

rather than the more traditional images of motherhood. Stilistically, the work is looser

and lighter in touch, a symphony of different shades of white, and it clearly shows Cassat

moving increasingly towards impressionism. So much so that a year later, in 1879,

Cassat cemented a creative relationship with the group by accepting their invitation to show

at the fourth annual impressionist exhibition held on the first floor of number 28,

Avenue de Loppera. One of the works that Cassat showed in the fourth impressionist exhibition

was this one, woman with a pearl necklace in a loge or box at the theatre. In fact,

this is a sister Lydia. And what we have is a view of contemporary Paris,

more than a million people every month, went to the theatre in the city, so Cassat is painting

modern life as the impressionists were doing. But also, she's doing some other things.

Look at the figure of the woman, illuminated by the top left hand corner in a halo of

artificial light that casts challenging shadows on the woman's face and her body. She's also

wearing this pretty pink frock that both reveals her body and disguises it. And the painting in

some ways is about what we see and also what we don't see. The woman is looking at a show

and we're looking at her. She's observing a spectacle, but she is the spectacle as well.

It's also a work that is painted with visceral, expressionistic brushstrokes. We see Cassat

pushing at the technique of painting. But it has this other spatial twist, which is the mirror

in the background because we're aware of the theatre and what is happening because of this mirror.

What Cassat is doing is taking a device that other impressionists, red and white,

digger have used, as means of making more space in the painting. It's aware of extending the sense

of space. But she does some it rather subtle. Rather than have it parallel with the picture

plane, where you would see a reflection almost directly behind her and actually by implication

the painter or the spectator would wonder why they were not in the picture. She angles the mirror,

so we can see the reflection here on the left of the painting. And by doing that, she starts to make

much more aware of this whole idea of representation that painting is on one level, a mirror

of the world. And in this case, a mirror of modern Parisian life, evening life, night life. But

at the same time, she makes it aware of its artificiality too. Now, the critical response to this work

was very good. People wrote, at the exquisite symphonies of colour that you saw in Cassat's work.

But she did receive some harsh acrylicism and American ironically, who said that it looked like

a woman far gone with jaundice wrestling with a fan in a box at the theatre, and that it was

part of a movement or a new school that he had no comprehension of. Now, in a way, that's good

for Cassat, because she's blooded with the other impressionists, who had also been savagely criticised.

But perhaps most important to her, her father's response, reluctant to begin with if you remember,

but he says she's now known to the art world. Also, to other characteristics emerge. The first is,

she starts to work in series or to explore the subject matter from a number of different

viewpoints. In fact, the subject matter of in the loads or in the theatre box is something

that she picks up after this. Secondly, she starts to experiment technically much more with the

process of painting and of markmaking. The impressionist to which Cassat was now very much apart,

who are also interested in exploring the outside life of the city. And in this painting,

Cassat makes a rare foray into that territory. It shows a mother and child going out

for an afternoon drive in the wider blowing, a small forest, but effectively the wildest public

park or space in the city. Once again, the woman is a sister Lydia, together with

their girl's niece, a deal, and the family pony, but yet recently acquired by her aging and

in firm parents to pull their trap around Paris. The work contrasts the stiffness of the figures

with the sense of motion sweeping through the painting from right to left, a dynamic contemporary

image with a certain humour evident in the almost caricature like groom staring off in the opposite

direction. While Cassat was now initiated into this new radical world of the impressionists,

she was still limited in many respects. Without breaking major taboos, it was difficult for a

respectable woman to be fully involved in the public life of the cafe and the boulevard. And

by the care she had to give to her family. Her mother suffered regularly from illness and worse

in November 1882, her sister Lydia died. Cassat was devastated and didn't exhibit again

until the final impressionist exhibition of 1886. The end of impressionism proved to be

no hindrance to Cassat, who embarked on perhaps the most fruitful period of a career,

as she began to experiment with the process of printmaking. She seems to have been initially

inspired by a vast exhibition that the bows are in Paris of 725 Japanese woodcut prints

by Utomaro, Horishiga and others. You must not miss that, she writes to her friend,

Bert Mori Soda painter. I dream of it and I don't think of anything else but color on copper.

Still restricted domestically by her alien parents, Cassat began an ongoing series of domestic life

of women bathing, combing their hair, of tea parties, conversations, letter writing, and motherhood.

Some have said these are uneventful images, the daily routines of an upper-class woman,

but they tell a gentle story from a perspective rarely seen in the history of art,

that of a woman artist, and technically they show considerable invention and complexity,

with Cassat fusing the two traditional methods of aquatint and drypoint etching.

In turn, the prints also feel Cassat's paintings, not least an extraordinary mural that she produced

for the World Fair held in Chicago in 1893, when she was asked to paint a 12 by 58 foot epic

depicting modern woman. Cassat's mural sadly no longer in existence has been described as the

most important work by a woman artist in the 19th century. It sought to show how women had

risen from their original condition of servitude. At the centre of Cassat's panel,

was the subject of a young woman plucking the fruit of knowledge and science,

a subversion of Eve in the Garden of Eden, an area that Cassat also dealt with in her prints.

It was a highly ambitious project to the time when the few women artists who had any profile

were still encouraged to stick to pastels, portraits, and miniatures. Not surprisingly,

perhaps, the work was savagely criticized by the male cultural establishment, but it's

ample inspired numerous women over the next few decades.

Having completed a mural to the modern woman, Cassat then went on holiday to the south of France,

to on-teab, where she produced a series of works of which this is far and away the most striking.

It's called the Boating Party and pays distant but direct homage to a work produced by a manne that

was shown at the 1879's salon, and the Cassat subsequently helped be acquired by an American

collector and she described it as the last word in painting. Nonetheless, she decides to

try and produce a post-cript, which in a way is an evolution of manne's art and of impressionism more

broadly. That flickering quality, where sunlight dances on water, is still evident in Cassat's work,

but details are paired down, all we have is this bold, striking composition. In order to paint

this, Cassat, who was notoriously a sufferer of sea sickness, staged everything on the shore.

She went out to sea to make sketches of the effects of water, but was so chronically ill,

that she hired the boat, put it on the sand, so the sea was in the background and would frame

the heads and the silhouette to the figures. And then she hired three models, even though this

looks like a family, they're just hired models of a man here wearing the costume of the

Provincial Fisherman. And having staged the scene, what she produces is an extraordinary

tort and sophisticated formal composition. The composition is quite strongly cropped with the

horizon line and just an inch or so of sky visible at the top. And you get this amazing sense

of horizontal layering through the boat to the sea, to the shore, to the sky. But the real

tension here is in the foreground, where it's as if, as you stand in front of this work,

you're actually in the boat itself. It's an intimate painting that draws you into the scene.

Then, almost rebuffing the viewer, is the man who pulls away from the woman in the painting

and out towards the viewer, but to give that kind of tortness, because sat then has the sail

being pulled in the other way, so you get this push and pull motion. And all the lines from the

arabesque curves of the boat to the shore, to the man's hand, point inwards, and that's amplified

by the way that light casts this almost arrow-like form on the child's face. And this whole central

area becomes compelling. There's a tension between the figures as they look at each other,

and people have speculated on whether or not this was the father or meant to be the father,

or whether it was just a hired boat man. But ultimately I think what's really important

about the painting is that Cassat has this controlled, sophisticated and bold vision,

and the work announces the fact that she's reached some kind of artistic maturity.

Cassat's father had died in 1891, and although she was devastated, his death did give her

a new fan sense of freedom of her the first time in her life. She was able to buy her own house.

Here, the beautiful shadow of Beau-Fren, where she'd stayed some as previously, and she'd put

models in boats on the little lake and started to paint around the mill, and increasingly she

became enchanted with both the gardens and the house in what became a large studio in the outdoors.

But inevitably for Cassat, the world limitations on her freedom, not least, are ailing mother.

Nonetheless, she was able to move with some degree of ease between the hustle and bustle of

Paris, 90 km away, and this tranquil country retreat.

If it was the death of her father that an initiated a new fan sense of freedom for Cassat,

the death of her mother in 1895 triggered her last great creative phase.

Perhaps in homage to her own mother, Cassat explored more intently than ever the subject of

mother and child. It's one of the most prominent themes in art history,

usually a depiction of the Virgin Mary and her infant son, but Cassat paints tender,

caring images of modern mothers, feeding, bathing and reading to their children.

In a way, their yearnful pictures, Cassat never had any children of her own,

and proclaimed on more than one occasion that she was married to her art.

Soon after, with the outbreak of World War I, Cassat was forced to head south to grass,

but she soon came back here to Beaufren. And for the last 10 years of her life,

she had a studio in a print room here in the mill. But sadly, she spent more time taking joy in the

cataracts. And then, on the 14th of June, 1926, the ripe old age of 83,

Mary Cassat died. A highly successful artist financially in her lifetime, but one who in a later

years thought perhaps she may have sold out too much to the market.

It's quite easy to overstate the case with Cassat. She was, after all, a fringe member,

if an accomplished one, of the most radical art movement of the last 200 years,

impressionism. But now, 80 years or so after her death, with the dust settling,

I think two things emerge. One, she's a very important, early, great American artist,

helping to build up a cultural momentum whose impact is still evident today.

And secondly, and perhaps most crucially, even though she hated to be called or labelled a woman artist,

she's a pioneering woman figure. One of a handful of women artists before the 20th century,

whose reputations were strong. And now, at the beginning of a new century,

when women are at least the equal, if not perhaps stronger than men, as a kind of force in the

visual arts. The example of Mary Cassat seems highly significant.