MARY CASSATI

Mother and child (The oval mirror) c.1899

Although Cassatt first addressed the subject of motherhood around Cassatt's quotations from art history originated in her close study 1880, it was only in the 1890s that she began to explore the subject of the old masters. both at the Louvre in Paris and during trips to extensively.1 The maternal theme may seem an odd choice for an Italy and Spain. Although she was a member of the Avant-garde, unmarried woman as independent as Cassatt. who had no children she remained interested in, and influenced by, tradition. She even of her own, yet she treated it with an unaffected naturalness that counselled the Havemeyers to collect art from various periods, firmly diverged from the cloying sentimentality of many of her more believing that fine paintings of any era could easily be displayed conventional contemporaries. During the late nineteenth century, together. In April1915, she had an opportunity to include her work in women- especially mothers- were viewed as humanity's guardians an exhibition at 's Galleries that brought together of decency and virtue, and Cassatt appears to have used the subject old and new. The show, which was intended to raise money for of mothers and children not to depict a limiting domesticity, but women's suffrage, was organised by Mrs Havemeyer. who became a rather to highlight women's moral authority. 2 politically active feminist following the death of her husband in 1907. The display featured loans from prominent American collectors. as In Mother and child (The oval mirror), which centres on a mother well as old master and modern paintings she and her husband had tenderly embracing her young son, Cassatt underscores the acquired, including Cassatt's paean to motherhood Mother and child importance of the maternal bond by evoking religious art. The (The oval mirror). 5 woman's gentle, adoring look and the boy's sweet face and contrapposto pose recall Italian Renaissance images of the Virgin and EA Child, a suggestion reinforced by the oval mirror framing the boy's head like a halo. The framing is not by accident but by design, as Cassatt carefully arranged the composition first in a drypoint print, in which the distinctive halo effect is even more pronounced. 3 Cassatt's deliberate references to the Italian Renaissance were easily discerned; her colleague informed her that the painting 'has all of your qualities and all your faults- it's the Infant Jesus and his English nurse'. Cassatt's friends and patrons HO and Louisine Havemeyer, who purchased the painting for their own collection, referred to it as 'The Florentine Madonna'.4

Mother about to wash her sleepy child 1880 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) is usually deemed to be Cassatt's first major treatment of motherhood in oil. 2 Judith A Barter. ': Themes. sources. and the modern woman', in Judith A Barter et al., Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman [exhibition catalogue], The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 1998, pp.73-5. 3 Natalie Spassky et al., American Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vol.//, A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born Between 7876 and 7845, Kathleen Luhrs (ed.), New York, 1985, p.646. 4 Spassky et al., American Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, p.646. 5 Nancy Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt: A Life, New York, 1994, pp.263. 306.

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