Mary Cassatt (1845-1926)
Mother and Two Children, 1901
Cassatt had studied at the Academy for five years beginning in 1861, going abroad to continue her studies in 1866, making her Salon debut in 1868. Except for when she returned for a short period during the Franco-Prussian War, France would be her home for the rest of her life. Although an expatriate, her family’s fortune derived from the Pennsylvania Railroad and gave her name a continuing economic presence in the state. She was the only American member of the French Impressionists, with whom she would exhibit beginning in 1877, and continuing until 1882.
Executed at the beginning of the artist’s late period, Mother and Two Children (1901) was painted when the artist was fifty-six. At the turn of the twentieth century, her reputation was secure and her prestige in the international art world at its height: “The most eminent of living American women painters.” During this period she traveled extensively, and her many social obligations meant she had less time to spend in her studio. Cassatt continued working until about 1915, when problems with her eyes forced her stop painting.
The painting portrays a typical subject she had explored in paintings, prints, and drawings for more than two decades. In contrast to the flaneur boulevardiers of the male Impressionists like her friend Degas, her subject is situated in distinctly female space, and is a domestic scene within the world of women. A graceful image of a woman with two children, the circular format evokes the Renaissance stability of Raphael’s Madonnas. The ease of the mother’s pose, emblematic of maternal affection, and the beautiful gown she wears show the cocooned comfort of their economic circumstance. Yet such a comfortable image could intersect modern political concerns. This painting was originally produced as part of a mural competition for the State Capitol building in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Cassat, frustrated with the state of government and the amount of graft involved, eventually withdrew her work from the competition. In 1915, the painting was shown at Knoedler Gallery in New York, as part of a “Loan Exhibition of Old and Modern Painters for the Benefit of Woman Suffrage,” organized by Cassatt’s good friend, collector Louisine Havemeyer.
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