BABY’S TOILET · MARY CASSATT
CHAPTER IX · THE “WOMEN-PAINTERS”: BERTHE MORISOT, MARY CASSATT, MARIE RACQUEMOND, EVA GONZALÈS
“TOUTE TOILE QUI NE CONTIENT PAS UN TEMPÉRAMENT, EST UNE TOILE MORTE”
ZOLA
AMONGST the artists who contributed paintings to the eight exhibitions of the Impressionist group are four women, who were influenced by the new methods: Mdlle. Berthe Morisot, Madame Marie Bracquemond, Miss Mary Cassatt, and Mdlle. Eva Gonzalès.
The story of Berthe Morisot is romantic. She was the great grand-daughter of Fragonard, a famous beauty, a pupil of Manet, then the wife of his brother Eugène. Her position in the art world of France was unique, and her death at the early age of fifty in 1895 cut short a career devoted to a most charming and delicate style. She excelled above all in two branches of her art—an exquisite draughtsmanship and a most luminous and poetic sense of colour. Technical difficulties never discouraged her. She was one of those rare and fortunate individuals who can intuitively surmount any problem and consequently hardly require a teacher. Madame Eugène Manet was an artist to her finger-tips. Her work is charged with a feminine charm sympathetic to the temperament of any painter. Her canvases are iridescent poems in paint, and she possessed many qualities in common with her illustrious ancestor. “Only one woman created a style,” wrote the novelist George Moore (who, it may be remembered, had a close acquaintanceship with many of the Impressionists), “and that woman is Madame Morisot. Her pictures are the only pictures painted by a woman that could not be destroyed without creating a blank, a hiatus in the history of art.” She was a woman of great personality and charm, and took an active part in the furtherance of the movement which was initiated by her brother-in-law. “My sister-in-law would not have existed without me,” said Manet one day in the Rue d’Amsterdam to George Moore, and the latter adds, “True, indeed, that she would not have existed without him; and yet she has something that he has not—the charm of an exquisite feminine fancy, the charm of her sex. Madame Morisot is the eighteenth century quick with the nineteenth; she is in the nineteenth turning her eyes regretfully looking back on the eighteenth.”
Miss Mary Cassatt is an American subject. She was born at Pittsburg, studied at the Philadelphia Academy, and then, after some work with Degas, became an accomplished painter of children and the varied scenes of maternity. A pastellist of note, with Raffaëlli she succeeded in resuscitating the moribund art of etching in colour. Miss Cassatt’s work shows evidence upon every side of unwearying years of effort. Its dominant character is strength, and, with the single exception of Berthe Morisot, the artist is probably one of the most virile woman painters the world has seen. Strength is decidedly not the keynote of any of the works of Angelica Kauffmann, Madame Lebrun, or even of the many women who exhibit to-day, although they display other qualities worthy of praise. Miss Cassatt has experimented in numerous directions, has often tried to express herself in a fresh way. She has succeeded. Her draughtsmanship is exceptionally firm, and her colour bright, pure, and harmonious. She has worked in oil, charcoal, water-colour, pastel, and etching, and has remained faithful to the inspiration of her master Degas, and through him to the art of Japan.