Research Paper On Mary Cassatt: A Really Influential Person Into The New Idea Of Impressionism

I have chosen to talk about Mary Stevenson Cassatt. Born 1844 in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. She spent her early years of life in France and Germany with her family. Her father was very against her doing anything with artwork. He told her that he would not help support her art in anyway but give her enough for her basic needs. From 1860-1862 Mary went to school at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Women were not able to travel on their own in this period, Paris then became an option of study in 1865, she took private lessons from an academic painter, Jean-Leon Gerome, and went into sketching. She then stayed in Paris and studied with more artists like Edouard Frere and Paul Soyer. Cassatt’s first painting called The Mandolin Player was placed in the Paris Salon in 1868. Her career in France was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War, she returned to Philadelphia in the summer of 1870.

After she returned to Europe in early 1870’s she spent months studying major and important paintings done by Correggio, Parmigianino and Carlo Raimondi, who was the head of the engraving classes at Parma Academy. In June 1874, Cassatt began to make her life in Paris where her work was placed on a bigger scale for the community to admire. Her family later joined her in ’77. The same year, she was approached by Edgar Degas, he asked her to join a group of people who were artists as well, this group is later called the Impressionist. Mary was the only American who was really a part of the group, her artwork was placed in four of their eight art exhibits.

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Under all their influence and advice, Cassatt was able to revise her to techniques and the use of color and light. This was a indication of her respect for the works of the French. Degas, who was her mentor would show her how things should be and encouraged her to try new things to make her career blossom. He suggested that she tries printmaking and showed her how to do the copper engravings, this gave her more strength in her artwork. Mary’s art was part of the late 19th century. She was interested in figure compositions. As her paintings began to become more well known, her themes began to focus on the subjects of her family, the theater, and the opera. She later made her artwork all about the mother and child. She would do that by kindheartedness and naturalness in paintings, by using pastels and prints.

Mary Cassatt focused her time on painting and printmaking as her form of artwork. As things began to slow down though, she wondered if she could actually make a living out of the art life, in July of 1871 she moved back to America to look for something to support herself. Shortly after this took place, the head bishop responsible for the catholic church asked her to recreate two different pieces of art that had originally been done by Correggio.

Cassatt’s work was a combination of influences from Japan and European, it combined pastel color palette and brush strokes of Impressionism. A lot of the work she created, was done with more than one kind of method to make her artwork more well known. This helped her to establish a professional success in a time period when very few women were seen as serious artists.

Mary’s work depicted a more local setting, this meaning that it was more public spaces and they were free to inhabit. The visible work used is usually seen as more “feminine”, most critics agreed that this brought her a specific technique and skill that helped bring emotional insight to her subject matter. Apart from gaining professional relationships with artists, dealers, and collectors, she became a key figure in a major turn of events in the world, this helped establish the perception for Impressionist art in her hometown country.

Impressionism was an art movement categorized by small, thin, brush strokes, open composition, and stress on exact lighting. The Impressionist exhibit created in 1879 is one of the most successful ones that we have on record today. Even though they were constantly criticized and harshly accused, profit was made and many works were sold. Cassatt displayed eleven works of her own over the years, including a Loge. This painting was reviewed by many different audiences and they were told to have bright colors and that the representation of the people are really accurate.

In 1886, Mary provided two new paintings into the very first Impressionist museum in the United States. Much of her collection now days is placed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. She also made several portraits of her family members during that period. Her style began to progress, she moved from impressionism to a more straightforward approach. After this, she decided that it would be better to just identify herself with any art movement and experiment with a variety of techniques that could better her as an artist.

As mentioned before, many of her works were all based upon the idea of mothers and children. In her painting, Little girl in Blue Armchair, this is an important work of her more mature career, a young girl sitting alone in a local and central room. There is nothing to give off any ideas that there is something around the girl, meaning there are no tables or no small indicators. This painting is something that was the start of a new interpretation of children and their true behaviors. Impressionism is shown by the way the paining is done and also how the young girl was posed in the chair.

Cassatt’s use of bright colors and the way the art was placed, was a representation of an independent artist and painter that she used to work with. This oil painting shows the arrangement, raised viewpoint and cropping of the scene all indicate the influence of Japanese art. The composition still coheres to the space and the various junctures having been carefully conceived to create a balanced whole. The blue coloring of the furniture gives the sense of restlessness and the lack of energy, both of these can be seen by the girls pose. This piece of art shows people as they are not as an innocent person. My opinion on this painting is that I think it was a good representation of what her artwork really was all about. She wanted to make sure that the people and places that influenced her, really came through in her artwork. I think that it came out how she wanted it to. I liked how simple the picture was but at the same time you were able to understand the full message behind the objects and little girl.

The second painting that Mary Cassatt was known for is called In the Loge. The painting portrays a middle-aged woman attending some type of performance at a famous theater in Paris. The black color of her outfit is shown in the clothing of other figures in the background, including a man who is sitting a few seats down who is looking at her through his own pair of glasses. This painting has grasped the facts that the members of the well-dressed audience are really putting on their own performance for each other.

The lady may be looking at stage performance but the other members are only focused on her. Entertainments were extremely popular in Paris, they enjoy diversions, not only from the show, but also for the opportunity to see, and be seen by their peers. Women knew that they would be looked at when attending the theater so they would wear lots of jewelry and fancy clothes to make them stand out even more. Impressionists made these paintings interesting by using modern activities. Cassatt uses the traditional idea like using the act to look, breaking down the usual boundaries between the person doing the observing and the ones being observed, or the audience and the performer. This was an oil painting done on a canvas.

I wasn’t a huge fan of this painting mostly because I had a hard time really understanding what was going on in the picture. I think that it was a good painting and after reading about it I was able to kind of get a sense of what was happening but it still wasn’t my favorite. I think that it was a good representation of how the times used to be and how they really influenced the people to go out and be a part of the changing times.

I decided to do my research paper on Mary Cassatt because I think that she was a really influential person into the new idea of Impressionism. She started a new era for paintings and how they really needed to be seen, this was truly a change to peoples point of views as an artist. Women in this time period especially American women, weren’t able to attend art school or any school for that matter.

Both Mr. Cassatt, her father, and the rest of society didn’t accept American women as a true artist no matter how good their artworks were. After being sent to Paris for school, most of the teachers and students didn’t believe that she would belong there. She had a hard time getting anyone to teach her the different ways of art so she went to Paris and taught herself by copying works of art from museums.

I really think that her art work was a really big influence for people in this time period and made it almost a new time period because it became a new start for women to get their opinions and ideas out into the open and have them be shared with others. She opened new doors of Impressionism too and made it so that we can have all of these inspiring paintings. Her artwork really describes the things of her life and how maybe difficult or hard things were for her. All that she wanted to do was go to art school and learn the different ways that are could be represented, but because of the times and the fact that she was a woman made it so that this wasn’t even a slight possibility. Mary Cassatt paved a path for younger women to really follow the things that they wanted to do and believed that they could do it if they wanted to make it happen. I think she was an amazing example both in artwork and work with Impressionism.

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