Collection of Mary Cassatt Archive and Catalogue Raisonne

Mary Cassatt

(1844-1926)

Collection of Mary Cassatt Archive and Catalogue Raisonné

Adelson Galleries, Inc.

Dear Ron,

In the 1990s I had the opportunity to take on the revision of the Mary Cassatt Catalogue Raisonné. The seminal work on this American woman artist was done by Adelyn Breeskin in the post war era, who published her book in 1970. By the 1990s it was deemed in need of further work in that it was incomplete and missing many discoveries, and it unfortunately contained many errors and misattributed pictures.

We were approached by Mrs. Breeskin’s daughter, Gloria Peck, to carry on the work. She gave us the archive, which dated back to the Durand-Ruel Gallery photograph files from the 19th century. I set up a team with three distinguished scholars: Dr. William Gerdts, Jay Cantor, and Pamela Ivinsky. We wrote a software to organize the data and dug in.

By the end of 2020, Dr. Gerdts and Pamela Ivinsky had passed away, and Jay Cantor had retired. Fortunately our work was done. The Catalogue Raisonné was finished electronically, and had been open online to scholars and museums for several years.

Along the way, Adelson Galleries did several Cassatt exhibitions which had emphasized works on paper. I knew that this medium had been a particular area of her genius.

This collection exemplified her range, originality, and great draftsmanship. The group also includes the stellar pastel of her sister in law, Mrs. Alexander Cassatt, which was acquired from the Cassatt descendants years ago.

In all, this is a museum quality collection of the greatest woman artist of the Impressionist period.

At the end of this book, please find an excellent review of Mary Cassatt at Work, on exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art until September 8, then at Legion of Honor, San Francisco from October 5, 2024 to January 26, 2025.

A major retrospective of the artist is in the works, scheduled to open next year at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, then traveling to London and New York.

Warren June 11, 2024

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Mrs. Alexander J. Cassatt in a Blue Evening Gown Seated at a Tapestry Frame, c. 1888

Pastel on paper

32 1/4 x 25 3/4 inches

AG 4986

$3,500,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Mrs. Alexander J. Cassatt in a Blue Evening Gown

Seated at a Tapestry Frame, c. 1888

Pastel on paper

32 1/4 x 25 3/4 inches

AG 4986

Provenance: The artist

Alexander J. Cassatt (brother of the artist, husband of the sitter)

Elizabeth (Elsie) Foster Cassatt Stewart (daughter of Alexander J. Cassatt and the sitter), Haverford, Pennsylvania

By family descent, to the present

Exhibitions:

Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Mary Cassatt, April 22-May 29, 1960, no #

Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Mary Cassatt and Philadelphia, February 17-April 14, 1985, #18, illustrated

Shelburne Museum, Vermont, Mary Cassatt: Friends and Family, June 21 - October 26, 2008. Exhibition also traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, November 21, 2008 - January 25, 2009.

Literature:

Wager-Smith, Curtis. “World-Famous Painter of Children and Their Mothers,” Philadelphia Public Ledger (May 3, 1914), Magazine Section, p. 1.

Sweet, Frederick A. Miss Mary Cassatt, Impressionist from Philadelphia. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966, p. 56.

Breeskin, Adelyn Dohme. Mary Cassatt: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oils, Pastels, Watercolors, and Drawings. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1970, illustrated p.74, number 127.

Lowe, David. “Mary Cassatt,” American Heritage 25 (December 1973), p. 98.

Hale, Nancy. Mary Cassatt. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975, p. 44.

Mathews, Nancy Mowll. Mary Cassatt: A Life. New York: Villard Books, 1994, pp. 180-1, illustrated p. 181.

Mathews, Nancy Mowll. Cassatt: A Retrospective. Southport, CT: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, 1996, illustrated p. 149.

Pollock, Griselda. Mary Cassatt: Painter of Modern Woman. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998, pp. 127-8, illustrated p. 127.

Warren Adelson, Jay Cantor, William H. Gerdts, Pamela A. Ivinski, Mary Cassatt: A New Catalogue Raisonné, no. 144

When Mary Cassatt first began her artistic studies, in the 1860s, pastel had fallen out of favor as a medium for serious artists. Later in the decade, this situation had started to change, and by 1870, a movement was underway to revive the art form, which had been largely forgotten since the Rococo period. Cassatt, after joining the Impressionist group in the late 1870s, took an active role in reestablishing pastel as an acceptable medium for professional artists, and also played an important part in redefining the manner in which it was used. Mrs. Alexander J. Cassatt in a Blue Evening Gown Seated at a Tapestry Frame, ca. 1888, is a stellar example of Cassatt’s contribution to the history of pastel painting, for it pays tribute to Rococo conventions while reshaping them according to modernist aesthetics and the artist’s personal vision.

Mrs. Alexander J. Cassatt in a Blue Evening Gown Seated at a Tapestry Frame is portrait of Cassatt’s sister-in-law, née Maria Lois Buchanan in 1847, and known as Lois to family and friends. She was the niece of James Buchanan, the fifteenth President of the United States, and her uncle on her mother’s side was Stephen Collins Foster, the beloved American composer famed for songs including “Oh! Susanna.” In 1868, Lois married Cassatt’s brother Alexander, an engineer who later became President of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Lois was the subject of an earlier and somewhat controversial portrait commission. Though Cassatt originally recommended her Impressionist colleague Pierre-Auguste Renoir to Lois and Alexander, they chose another American expatriate artist, James Abbott McNeill Whistler. The resulting portrait, Arrangement in Black, No. 8: Portrait of Mrs. Cassatt (private collection), was begun in Britain in 1883 but not completed for a few years. The picture did not entirely please the family, for Lois would have preferred to wear an evening gown rather than the dark riding habit Whistler requested. In addition, the likeness was thought to be somewhat weak, though Cassatt explained in a letter, “I believe he does [this] on purpose. He does not talk to the sitter, but sacrifices the head to the ensemble.”

Cassatt likely created her portrait, Mrs. Alexander J. Cassatt in a Blue Evening Gown Seated at a Tapestry Frame, in the spring of 1888, when Lois and her family were visiting the artist in Paris. A number of features imply that Cassatt may have intended her work to some degree as a response to Whistler’s portrait. For example, Lois wears the kind of fashionable dress she had envisioned for the earlier picture. The palette, too, with its restrained balance of light blue and peach hues, brings to mind Whistler’s tonalism while providing a more attractive setting for the figure than the black and white of his own composition. In addition, the face more closely resembles the sitter.

This likeness, however, does little to flatter Lois, leading some family members and critics to interpret the picture as evidence of animosity between the sisters-in-law. While there were difficult moments in their relationship, the two women remained on good terms immediately after the completion of the picture, which was closely guarded by the family until recently, suggesting that it was accepted as an exemplar of Cassatt’s realist style. Indeed, the picture has much in common with an outstanding group of drypoint etchings that Cassatt created around 1889-1890, in which her realism reached its sharpest peak.

Like those etchings, Mrs. Alexander J. Cassatt in a Blue Evening Gown Seated at a Tapestry Frame combines a pointed naturalism with a sense of abstraction. While the composition has been likened to an Impressionist “snapshot” view of modern life, at the same time it is tightly controlled, and extraneous details have been eliminated. The subject matter of a woman working at a tapestry frame was popular during the Rococo period, but Cassatt’s pastel handling extends the use of the medium beyond that imagined by artists of the late 18th century. In fact, pastel had fallen out of favor in part because it was considered too feminine, and therefore most suitable to

the complexions of pretty women and babies and frivolous Rococo themes. Cassatt availed herself of pastel’s traditional textures when she depicted Lois’s skin with a smooth, velvety touch, but she employed the medium to much different effect in order to capture the crisp, rustling qualities of the evening gown. The extremely limited palette, so becoming to Lois’s auburn hair and pale skin, is accented by the rhyme of the sitter’s wedding band and her gold thimble, and by the simple pearl choker that adorns her neck. In Mrs. Alexander J. Cassatt in a Blue Evening Gown Seated at a Tapestry Frame, Cassatt honored her sister-in-law by combining her oft-noted talent for “frankness” with a modernist tendency toward abstraction to create a work that succeeds as a portrait of a dignified woman and as a paradigm of her late 1880s style.

This pastel will be included in the Cassatt Committee's revision of Adelyn Dohme Breeskin's catalogue raisonné of the works of Mary Cassatt.

Counterproofs

A pastel counterproof is made by placing a dampened sheet of paper on top of a pastel and applying pressure (by rubbing or by the use of a press) to transfer some of the surface of the pastel to the new sheet. The technique can be remarkably successful in creating a second work, which is a mirror image and is somewhat softer looking, while the pastel itself appears essentially unchanged, even if more than one counterproof impression was made from it.

This process was used frequently by artists of the eighteenth century but lapsed early in the nineteenth with the ascendancy of Romanticism, which demanded the weightier aesthetic of oil paint. In the later nineteenth century, the fresh airy hues of pastel were once again found to be particularly appealing, and the flattened surfaces and subtle colors that result from the counterproof process naturally attracted artists who were immersed in the ethereal symbolism and patterns that characterized much Post-Impressionist art at the turn of the century.

Mary Cassatt’s friend and champion, Edgar Degas, produced a great number of counterproofs of charcoal drawings and pastels, several of which we eventually reworked.* But Cassatt, who we now know produced a comparable body of work in this medium, appears to have left her counterproofs untouched.

*These are included in the sale catalogues of works from the Degas studio as “Impressions en couleur et en noir” and “Impressions rehaussées de couleurs.”

21 3/4 x 16 1/2 inches

55.24 x 41.91 cm

AG 4811

$250,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Smiling Sara in a Big Hat Holding Her Dog (No.1), c. 1905-1915

Pastel counterproof on Japan paper

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Bust Length Sketch of Margot in a Big Hat and a Red Dress, c. 1903

Pastel counterproof on Japan paper

23 1/2 x 19 inches

Framed Dimensions: 35 1/3 x 31 1/3 inches

AG 4831

$175,000

17 3/4 x 21 1/8 inches

AG 4837

$200,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Girl in a Hat with a Black Ribbon, c. 1902

Pastel counterproof on Japan paper

22 x 17 1/2 inches

AG 4842

$75,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Girl Wearing a Hat with a Blue Bow, [c. 1901-03]

Pastel counterproof on Japan paper

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Head of Adele (No.3), 1892 [c. 1908-09]

Pastel counterproof on Japan paper

21 1/2 x 18 inches

Framed Dimensions: 31 x 27 1/2 x 2 inches

Catalogue #66

AG 4792

$50,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Head of Simone in a Green Bonnet with Wavy Brim (No. 2), c. 1904 [c. 1901-03]

Pastel counterproof on Japan paper

21 1/2 x 17 5/8 inches

Catalogue #55 AG 4826

$125,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Heads of Reine and Margot, c. 1902 [c. 1900]

counterproof on Japan paper

25 1/8 x 20 1/2 inches

AG 4815

$200,000

Pastel

Pastel counterproof on Japan paper

27 1/4 x 20 5/8 inches

Counterproof signature a lower left

AG 4791

$175,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Helene of Septeuil, with a Parrot, c. 1890

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Woman and Child in Front of a Fruit Tree, [c. 1893-94]

Pastel counterproof on Japan paper

22 1/4 x 17 3/4 inches

Framed Dimensions: 34 1/2 x 29 1/2 x 1 inches

Signed with counterproof signature: M Cassatt AG 4843

$75,000

Aquatints

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Under The Horse-Chestnut Tree (cat. 162.b), 1896-97

Aquatint and drypoint on paper

16 x 11 3/8 inches

Signed at lower right: Mary Cassatt AG 3074

$125,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Under The Horse-Chestnut Tree (cat. 162.d), 1896-1897

Aquatint and drypoint on paper

15 7/8 x 11 3/8 inches

AG 3076

$125,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

In the Omnibus (Intérieur d'un tramway passant un pont), 1890-91

Drypoint and aquatint, printed in colors on paper 14 3/8 x 10 5/8 inches

Initialed at lower left: MC / annotated: E AG 6416

$275,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

The Lamp, 1890-91

Drypoint, soft-ground and aquatint printed in colors on paper

Plate: 12 1/2 x 9 7/8 inches

Sheet: 16 7/8 x 11 1/2 inches

Signed and inscribed at lower right: 'Imprimée par l'artiste et M. Leroy / Mary Cassatt / (25 épreuves)' AG 7589

$250,000

Watercolor on paper

15 1/8 x 11 1/8 inches

Stamped at lower right: Collection de Mathilde X AG 7138

$45,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Profile of a Seated Woman Sewing (Femme Assise Cousant), c. 1906

Pencil

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Sketch for "Young Girl Fixing Her Hair", c. 1889

Pencil on tracing paper

10 1/8 x 7 1/8 inches

Framed Dimensions: 18 x 14 1/2 x 1 inches

AG 6454

$15,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Sketch: Grandmother and Child, 1893

Pencil on tracing paper

Border line: 7 1/4 x 4 3/4 inches

Sheet: 8 3/4 x 5 3/4 inches

Framed Dimensions: 14 1/4 x 11 1/2 x 1 inches

AG 6455

$25,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Two Ladies in a Loge, Facing Right, 1879-80

Pencil with soft-ground on verso on paper 14 1/4 x 11 inches

Signed at lower right: Mary Cassatt AG 6337

$250,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Drawing for 'The Round-Backed Armchair', c. 1881

Soft pencil on paper with soft-ground on the verso 11 1/8 x 7 3/8 inches

Framed Dimensions: 19 3/4 x 16 x 1 inches

Initialed M.C / annotated on verso: 139 AG 6450

$175,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Drawing for 'The Round-Backed Armchair' (verso), c. 1881

Soft pencil on paper with soft-ground on the verso 11 1/8 x 7 3/8 inches

Framed Dimensions: 19 3/4 x 16 x 1 inches

Initialed M.C / annotated on verso: 139 AG 6450

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Two Peasant Children on the Grass, c. 1886

Soft pencil on paper with soft-ground on the verso 9 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches

Initialed M.C. / annotated on verso: 132 AG 6453

$35,000

Soft-Ground Etching

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Katharine Kelso Cassatt, c. 1889

Soft-ground and aquatint on paper

9 3/8 x 6 1/4 inches

Framed Dimensions: 17 1/2 x 14 3/4 x 1 inches

Initialed at lower left: M.C AG 3102

$30,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Lydia Reading, Turned toward Right, c. 1881

Soft-ground and aquatint on paper

7 x 4 1/4 inches

Framed Dimensions: 16 1/2 x 12 1/2 x 1 inches

Signed in full in pencil: Mary Cassatt AG 6368

$25,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Two Children on the Grass, c. 1886

Soft-ground etching on paper

9 7/8 x 6 7/8 inches

M.C AG 6377

$30,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

On the Bench, c. 1889

Soft-ground etching, with netting texture on paper

7 7/8 x 5 1/2 inches

Initialed M.C . AG 6384

$30,000

Drypoint

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

The Parrot, c. 1891

Drypoint on paper

Plate: 6 1/4 x 4 3/4 inches

Sheet: 12 1/4 x 9 3/8 inches

Framed Dimensions: 14 x 12 x 1 inches

Annotated: D HPCatalogue #22 AG 6402

$45,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Antoinette Standing, Looking into a Hand Mirror, c. 1910

Drypoint on paper

8 1/8 x 5 3/4 inches

Signed in full: Mary Cassatt AG 6446

$10,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Baby's Back, 1890

Drypoint on paper

Plate: 9 1/8 x 6 3/8 inches

Sheet: 13 7/8 x 8 3/8 inches

Annotated: B. no 17. and HPAG 6387

$40,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Céleste and Marjorie, c. 1898

Drypoint on paper

Plate: 11 3/8 x 16 1/8 inches

Sheet: 12 1/8 17 5/8 inches

Framed Dimensions: 21 x 26 1/4 x 1 inches

Initialed: M.C / annotated: F AG 6432

$25,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

En Dèshabillè, c. 1889

Drypoint on paper

7 1/8 x 5 3/8 inches

Signed: Mary Cassatt / inititaled: M.C / inscribed: no 5 AG 6379

$10,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Heads of Two Young Women Looking to Right, c. 1898

Drypoint on paper

12 1/4 x 9 3/8 inches

Framed Dimensions: 22 1/2 x 17 3/4 x 1 1/2 inches

AG 6430

$15,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Hélène of Septeuil [Enfant au perroquet], c. 1890

Drypoint on paper

Plate: 9 1/4 x 6 1/8 inches

Sheet: 13 7/8 x 8 1/8 inches

Framed Dimensions: 16 1/2 x 13 x 1 inches

Annotated at lower right: C / HPCatalogue #21

AG 6398

$25,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Mother Berthe Holding Her Child, c. 1889

Drypoint on paper

9 1/4 x 6 1/4 inches

Signed at lower right: Mary Cassatt AG 6386

$25,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Drypoint on paper

9 1/4 x 6 1/4 inches lower right M. C AG 2949

$6,000

Mrs. Cassatt Threading A Needle (cat. 45), c. 1881

Drypoint on paper

9 1/8 x 6 5/8 inches

23.18 x 16.83 cm

Annotated at lower left: C / blue intitial stamp

AG 6391

$30,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Repose, c. 1890

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Repose, c. 1890

Drypoint on paper

9 1/8 x 6 5/8 inches

Framed Dimensions: 17 x 14 x 1 1/4 inches

Annotated at lower left: E

AG 6392

$30,000

Drypoint on paper

7 1/8 x 6 1/8 inches

Annotated at lower left: G AG 6396

$40,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Tea, c. 1890

The Bonnet, c. 1891

Drypoint on paper

7 3/8 x 5 1/2 inches

Framed Dimensions: 15 1/2 x 13 1/2 x 1 inches

Artist's blue initial stamp at lower left AG 6401

$15,000

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Lucy Davies

Breathtaking: Mary Cassatt at Work, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, reviewed

Cassatt's prints get a richly deserved room. Degas loved them. When he died, there were at least 58 in his collection

From magazine issue: 08 June 2024

‘A Goodnight Hug’, 1880, by Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt at Work

WMary Cassatt at Work Philadelphia Museum of Art, until 8 September, then at Legion of Honor, San Francisco, from 5 October 2024 to 26 January 2025 ork – in the sense of toil – is about the last thing a 19th-century painter wished to be associated with. Inspiration and success were gi!s bestowed on the lucky few – about as easy to grasp as smoke. For Mary Cassatt, however, art was nothing more than work. ‘E"ort upon e"ort,’ is how she described the process of painting to her friend, the collector Louisine Havemeyer.

Still, she produced almost 1,000 works in her lifetime, and Mary Cassatt at Work – a new exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art – tells us how. Spoiler: unswerving determination, ambition and, well, work.

With 130 paintings, pastels, drawings, and prints (36 of these works from the PMA’s own holdings), the exhibition is the largest devoted to Cassatt in the US in more than 25 years, and the #rst since 1985 in Philadelphia – where she lived for part of her teens and attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Pissarro admired her technical skill, Gauguin her charm and strength, but Degas was her true mentor

Cassatt is ripe for revisiting. In the century since her death she has been corralled as the painter of children and mothers which, though largely accurate, is reductive and has come to dull and diminish her. $is new show looks in other, less hackneyed directions at her work. In sympathetic style, it considers Cassatt’s devout professionalism; the ways in which she laid bare the work of her hands – knowingly leaving signs of manufacture in her pictures –and her perceptive portrayals of the work she observed in the domestic sphere.

$e show begins with an introductory room – its few objects spotlit; its dark walls conducive to close looking. ‘A Child’s Bath’ (1880), one of Cassatt’s earliest mother and child scenes, gets straight to the point, two points actually: that women with children – whether mothers or carers – were women at work, and that Cassatt’s de! use of complementary colours and lively brushwork, a dazzle of sharp, quick strokes conveying the wriggling child, were her chief impressionist credentials.

Cassatt studied in Paris for several years in the 1860s, submitting successfully to the Salon, but the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 had forced her to travel back to Philadelphia. It was at this time that her parents refused to further underwrite her artistic career. $is only seems to have goaded her into working harder.

Her return to Paris in 1874 coincided with the #rst impressionist exhibition. She was introduced to Degas in 1877, though she was already aware

of his work, admitting to ‘%atten[ing] my nose against the window’ of an exhibition of his pastels on Boulevard Haussmann. Cassatt readily accepted his invitation to join the impressionists, exhibiting with them four times between 1879 and 1886. Pissarro admired her technical skill, Gauguin her charm and strength, but Degas was always her true mentor – and lifelong friend. ‘$is is someone who feels the way I do,’ he said.

‘At the $eatre’ (c.1879), meanwhile, demonstrates Cassatt moving seamlessly between mediums – pastel blended with metallic paint, lending a #ne iridescence to a theatre-goer’s fan. Cassatt was the #rst to use the technique and apparently inspired Degas to try the same. It’s o!en said that Cassatt was born to the Pennsylvania Railroad, at the time Cassatt was starting out, he was still an engineer and raising horses.

All of which is to say that if earning money was at the top of Cassatt’s mind –she was ‘ravenous’ for it, she told a friend – who could blame her? Her parents provided her with a living, but models and a studio they considered ‘an unnecessary expense’.

$e catalogue tells us she was particularly e"ective at promoting impressionism in America. Her dealer Ambrose Collard described how Cassatt ‘laboured for the success of her comrades: Monet, Cézanne, Pissarro, Sisley and the rest… with a kind of frenzy’. She is known to have shaped the taste of many rich East Coast collectors, including her friend Havemeyer, and in doing so arguably brought the movement to America.

$e exhibition begins proper by immersing us in the socially strati#ed Paris of the 1870s and 1880s. $e room is cleverly divided into public and private, and conveys the way women inhabited and navigated both realms. You quickly clock how many of Cassatt’s subjects hover between the two: entering, leaving, looking from one space into another. Consider ‘Woman in a Loge’ (1879), for instance, where the subject has her back to the auditorium: its vibrating blaze of pink and gold hits you the moment you walk in. Or ‘Portrait of Madame J’ (1883), in which a subtly lit woman gazes far beyond the frame, too busy with her thoughts to court the approval of the viewer.

Cassatt gives her mothers work-worn hands, something she picked up from Botticelli

Hands are a key theme, our attention drawn to them throughout – in a way that eventually begins to feel a little laboured. $at said, I’d never noticed, and loved learning, how Cassatt gives her ‘mothers’ (many were actually paid models) reddened or work-worn hands (see below), something she picked up from Botticelli’s Madonna in the Louvre, whose #ngernails are worn down from labouring in the #elds.

$e Set of Ten, a suite of prints depicting the minutiae of daily life – a dress #tting, someone writing a letter, and so on – that Cassatt developed over the winter of 1890-1, gets its own, richly deserved room. $e care she poured into these is extraordinary, the e"ect of their jewel-bright colour and inventive linework breathtaking. Close up you see her %air for speci#city: the nursing mother cradling her baby’s foot, for instance, or the woman with a parasol looking anxiously out of the omnibus window. Degas loved Cassatt’s prints. When he died, there were at least 58 in his collection, including ‘ $e Maternal Caress’ from the Set of Ten.

Not everything the curators recruit to their cause is perfect, but each room holds much that is either interrogative or beautiful. Perhaps none more so than the #nal one, which is dedicated to images of rest and repose. I’d head straight for the prints: a trio of delicately drawn heads in one corner, and especially two tiny interiors showing Cassatt’s mother and father reading by lamplight, and her mother reading and sister sewing. $eir sense of shared time, the circle of light in the dark, the implied presence of Cassatt sat drawing on the other side of the table are wonderful.

WRITTEN BY Lucy Davies

‘Woman at Her Toilette’, c.1891, by Mary Cassatt

The works presented in this collection total $6,576,000.00.