Mary Cassatt used the techniques of Impressionism to acknowledge and celebrate the everyday life and rituals of women in the late nineteenth century. Cassatt’s earlier paintings show insight into the life of bourgeois gentlewomen in the late nineteenth century Perisian society. While her later and most impressive work shows women at work. In showing these women at work, Cassatt was portraying the reality of modern life for women of the time. I chose to do research on Mary Cassatt not only because I plan to visit her exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, but also because I have always enjoyed and admired her work. The subject matter of Mary Cassatt’s paintings was primarily that of women engaged in everyday activities and children. “As many art historians have correctly pointed out, Mary Cassatt and women of her class were limited in their subject matter, to depicting a world that was much more narrow and proscribed than that open to their male counterparts.” These respectable woman would not have gone into the cafes or brothels depicted by such artists as Degas. Instead, she would choose to show the world with which she was most familiar, the world that contained the daily rituals and activities of an upper middle-class woman.
These rituals and activities contain such things as; “Women as consumers of pleasurable and ostentatious entertainments, such as theater; women receiving friends according to the social rituals of the home; women as the primary teachers and protectors of children; and women creating and managing the environment that was so crucial to family, the private household.” Cassatt loved to uses children as subjects. Some of the hallmarks of Cassatt’s portrayal of children in her works during the 1880s and 1890s were her use of naturalism and the element of a pure, nonsexual sensuality. A subject that compelled Cassatt even more than children was the involvement of adults in the emotional and physical care for children. In the 1880s her compositions often depicted children being dressed, bathed, read to, or held. An example of such a composition is her oil on canvas painting entitled Reading that she painted in 1880 and is an image of Cassatt’s mother reading to her grandchildren. Another example of this kind of composition is a pastel on paper she did in 1880 entitled Mother and Child. Joris Karl Huysmans called these two works “impeccable pearls” when he viewed them at the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881.
The Term Paper on Men And Women Gender Jobs Work
Running Head: WORKPLACE ROLES OF MEN AND WOMEN COMPARED IN TODAY'S SOCIETY Work Place Roles Of Men and Women Compared in Today's Society Submitted by: Steven KopacSubmitted to: PierroStudent #: 2321040 Seminar Time: Tuesday @ 11: 30-12: 30 Course: Sociology 1 F 90 Brock University Date: Thursday February 8, 2001 Work Place Roles Of Men and Women Compared in Today's Society "Rosy cheeked and bright ...
However, Cassatt’s Portrait of a Little Girl, which captures a moment in the child’s life between rest and play, did not receive such acclaims. Portrait of a Little Girl was misread by many to be a foreshadowing of the child’s adult sexuality, when in fact the meaning of the image lies in the element of naturalism. Cassatt was merely trying to convey that “Children are less self conscious than adults; constantly rearranging their clothes and limbs and are often unaware of social conventions. Thus the work can be seen to reflect the then-current view of children as pure and unfettered beings.” “The first sight of Degas [‘s] pictures was the turning point in my artistic life,” Cassatt wrote in 1915 to a friend. Cassatt and Degas met in the 1870s and he soon became her mentor. “Although at no time a real pupil of Degas, she was particularly influenced by him. She shared his intellectual quality and his emphasis on draftsmanship, but to these she added a mixture of sentiment and crispness which was all her own” She had an appreciation for Degas’ fascination with artificial illumination and his unusual subjects. We see an example of this in Cassatt’s Woman in a Loge. In this painting a woman is shown in an evening dress, sitting in front of a mirror that is reflecting the image of an illuminated hall of an opera house. Cassatt and Degas shared “A restless, vivid intelligence and a predilection for self-criticism that led them both to reject the conservative artistic directions that had seemed so promising to them at the beginning of their careers.” Cassatt most closely resembles Degas when she adopts pastels, which were a medium that Degas had distinguished himself in, for exhibition pictures in 1879. Cassatt looked to Degas for guidance in order to capture the painterly effects using pastels.
The Essay on Mary Cassatt Print Woman Art
She was a woman who soared to the stars across the firmament of the male-dominated international art world. She was the only American, male or female, to become a member of the French Impressionists. Most women of her time were confined to the circumscribed world of marriage, homemaking and motherhood, but not her. Who is she She is Mary Cassatt, certainly the greatest American female artist of ...
Cassatt was also influenced by a Japanese graphic arts exhibit she attended in April and May of 1890 in Paris. After attending the exhibit, she wrote to a friend that she dreamt of it and could not think of anything else but color on copper. The bold lines in the compositions, the harmony of the colors, and the themes of the prints inspired Cassatt. The prints depicted the daily lives and ordinary activities of woman, similar to the themes of most of her own work. These woodcut prints that Cassatt admired not only had something in common with her work, but also shared many qualities of Impressionism. Some of these qualities included, a shared sense of primacy of nature, the graceful gestures of women, flattened space, dense pattern, and a powerful expression achieved through line, silhouette, and simplicity. We can see the influences of the Japanese prints in the way she used background patterns and the designs in the drapery, wallpaper and upholstery against a solid or pale color and her minimization of facial. This emphasis on surface pattern and the narrowing spatial field she used in such paintings as Tea exhibited the impact the Japanese prints had on her work. We are also able to see how Cassatt applies her classical training combined with an intensely personal vision of the world in her paintings.
We see an example of this in her 1878 painting Young Girl in a Blue Armchair, here the world is “seen simultaneously from the point of view of a child and an adult.” Cassatt also understood that establishing tension between the background and the foreground would mimic the focal shifts of human sight and perception. Mary Cassatt was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, on May 22, 1844 and died June 14, 1926. In the eighty-two years she was alive she proved herself to be one of the best and most influential female Impressionist. In fact, she is still proving herself in exhibitions around the world, seventy-three years after her death. In viewing her artwork, we are able to obtain insight into the life of the bourgeois gentlewomen of the late nineteenth-century. From her images of women at work on a tapestry to a woman bathing her child, “Tell us as much about Cassatt’s concern to depict the reality of modern life for women as the eternally poised Cup of Tea.” In painting these images, Cassatt has made herself eternal. She will forever be remembered and admired in the minds of artists all over the world.
The Essay on Canadian Women and the Second World War
The changing roles of women throughout history has been drastic, and none more so than the period during and after World War II. The irrevocable changes that occurred once the war started and women went to work were unprecedented. In the end, the changing role of Canada’s women during the War was the beginning of a chain reaction of events that have forever changed the Canadian workplace and also ...
