I must candidly confess that when I am called to criticize feminine essays in the Fine Arts or Belles-Lettres, my eulogisms are generally qualified by the restriction embraced in the phrase, “It is not bad for a woman.” But as regards this picture I find myself in a very different position. The copy of this great work, executed by Miss Cassatt, betrays such a surprising knowledge of art that a male artist, no matter how great his experience, might feel honored at having the authorship of this work attributed to him.
Later, from Madrid, Mary wrote to tell Emily that she had discovered Velázquez. “Velázquez oh! my but you knew how to paint!”
She worked without letup, in Madrid and Seville, then Antwerp for a summer, then Rome for seven months, with intermittent stops in Paris, which, she claimed, she had come to dislike.
In 1873, after a series of rejections of her work by the Paris Salon, she learned that one of her Spanish paintings, a large canvas of a bullfighter and his lady, had been accepted.
The pull of Paris proved too strong. Back in the city in 1874, after years of roving over half of Europe, she said she had come to stay. “She astonished me by telling me she is looking for an atelier here,” wrote Emily Sartain. “She has always detested Paris so much that I could scarcely believe it possible … but she says it is necessary to be here. …”
Mary Cassatt had been born in 1844 in western Pennsylvania, in what was then known as Allegheny City on the opposite side of the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh. Her mother, to whom she was devoted, was Katherine Kelso Johnston, the daughter of a Pittsburgh banker of Scotch-Irish descent. Her father, Robert Simpson Cassatt, whose forebears were French (the name was originally Cossart), became the first mayor of Allegheny City and succeeded so rapidly in finance and mercantile enterprises that by the time he reached his early forties he felt ready for retirement, whereupon he moved the family east, settling first in Lancaster County.
Mary was the fourth of five children. The oldest, Lydia, was followed by two brothers, Alexander and Robert. The youngest, Joseph, arrived when Mary was five. Childhood was set in perfect comfort, amid books and fine furniture, and in as handsome a country home as could be found in Lancaster County. But the mother and father had desired city life and so moved to Philadelphia. Then followed four years in Europe—two in Paris, two in Germany—at the end of which the family returned to Pennsylvania, first to West Chester, outside Philadelphia, then Philadelphia again.
They were not people of immense wealth, rather, as they would have said, they were respectably “comfortable.” Refined in their tastes, they frowned on ostentation. The children attended the best private schools. Good grammar and proper manners were insisted upon. Everyone dressed well, and father Robert Cassatt continued to see no necessity for a return to gainful employment.
At sixteen Mary, “Mame,” as she was called in the family, enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on Chestnut Street. When, at twenty, she announced her wish to continue her studies abroad, her father exploded, declaring he would almost rather see her dead than become an artist. But Mary persisted. She always persisted. He gave his consent and was not known to have ever regretted it.
The summer of 1874 she spent back at Villiers-le-Bel working with Thomas Couture. That fall she rented a studio in Paris and, with sister Lydia, moved into a small nearby apartment on the rue de Laval (now Victor Massé) at the foot of Montmartre.
The course of her life was set. If becoming a professional artist—never a “woman who paints”—meant giving up marriage and a family of her own, so be it. She was adamant, at times even abrasive, on the matter.
Her appearance remained consistently, entirely ladylike. She stood not quite five feet six, considered tall for a woman. Her hair was light brown, her chin a bit sharp for her to have been considered pretty. Hers was a strong, intelligent face. The grey eyes were large and alert. And she had the slender figure and perfect carriage for her well-tailored ensembles.
“Miss Cassatt’s tall figure, which she inherited from her father, had distinction and elegance, and there was no trace of artistic négligé, or carelessness, which some painters affect,” wrote Louisine Elder of New York, who was struck even more by how much Miss Cassatt knew and how animated she became.
Once having seen her, you could never forget her—from her remarkable small foot to the plumed hat with its inevitable tip upon her head and the Brussels lace veil without which she was never seen. She spoke with energy, and you would as soon forget her remarks when she conversed as to forget the motion of her hands.
Louisine Elder and Mary Cassatt met in Paris in 1874, at a time when Mary’s work was going well, her name becoming known in art circles in both Paris and New York. (She listed herself now as Mary Cassatt.) A portrait of hers, Madame Cortier, had been hung in the Salon.
In Paris with her mother and two sisters, nineteen-year-old Louisine was eager to see and learn as much as possible. She was enthralled by all that the vibrant Miss Cassatt had seen and accomplished, the places she had been, and wondered how she had ever summoned the courage to go off to Italy and Spain.
Mary took her to the opera and theater, talked long and fast about Correggio and Velázquez. “I felt that Miss Cassatt was the most intelligent woman I had ever met and I cherished every word she uttered. …” It was the threshold of a fifty-year-long friendship of far-reaching consequences.
At the same time, another friendship went on the rocks. For Emily Sartain, Mary’s strong-willed, occasionally dictatorial ways became too much. There was a dispute over some unknown matter and bitter feelings resulted. “Miss C. is a tremendous talker and very touchy and selfish, so if you hear her talking of me at home, as she has done lately in Paris, you will know the origin of it all,” Emily confided to her father. “I shall never become intimate with her again. …” Emily went home to Philadelphia to teach at the School of Design for Women, where she would have a long, distinguished career.
Not long afterward, in 1875, Mary discovered the work of a new group of artists who called themselves La Société Anonyme des Artistes—the Impressionists, as they were to be known, among whom were Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, and Edgar Degas. In much the way the American painter William Morris Hunt had the direction of his career changed by seeing a portrait by Thomas Couture in a Paris art store window, so Mary Cassatt reacted to seeing for the first time pastels by Degas in a window on the boulevard Haussmann.
“I would go there and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his art,” she would remember. When she said later, “It changed my life,” she was by no means exaggerating. It changed her life because it changed her work. An entirely new way of seeing and painting, for which she was to become famous, began then.
She took Louisine to see a Degas pastel titled Répétition de Ballet(Ballet Rehearsal) and urged her to buy it. “It was so new and strange to me!” Louisine wrote. “I scarcely knew how to appreciate it, or whether I liked it or not … [but] she left me no doubt as to the desirability of the purchase and I bought it upon her advice.”
The price was 500 francs, or about $100. By contrast, the American dry goods impresario A. T. Stewart had recently paid $60,000 for a painting by the French master Ernest Meissonier.
The purchase by Louisine Elder was the first of many to follow. She was to become, with her future husband, Henry O. Havemeyer—and with the continued guidance of Mary Cassatt—one of the great art collectors of the era and the first to bring works of the Impressionists home to America.
Mary Cassatt’s first major work in the Impressionist manner was to be a portrait of her mother.
II
Charles-Émile-Auguste Durand—Carolus-Duran, as he preferred—was still in his thirties, young to be the master of an atelier. Primarily a portraitist, he was flamboyant in appearance and manner, and exuberantly unorthodox in his teaching. His atelier on the boulevard Montparnasse was the most avant-garde in Paris.
Wil
d black hair, a sweeping, upturned black mustache, goatee, and a swarthy complexion, made him an arresting sight quite apart from his usual showy attire. A black velvet suit might be accented by a yellow shirt, a green tie, frilled cuffs, and a good deal of gold jewelry. He looked like a magician, which to his students he was.
He had spent two years in Spain and the influence of Velázquez had been powerful. His most arresting and important work thus far, The Woman with the Glove, a full-length portrait of his wife measuring five by seven feet, had all the drama and strong use of black of the Spanish master himself.
As a teacher, Carolus-Duran put far less emphasis on drawing than did such long-respected masters as Meissonier or Jean-Léon Gérôme. He stressed form and color. He wanted his students to paint directly—to take up the brush and draw and paint at the same time. To learn to paint, one had to paint, he preached. Painting was no mere “imitative” art.
Unlike the masters of other ateliers, Carolus-Duran kept his classes small—ten or fifteen students—and most of them were “happy American youths” who looked upon their master “as an elder brother,” as one wrote. Work commenced at seven-thirty in the morning. Twice weekly the master gave critiques, these sometimes accompanied by his virtuoso demonstrations, most often portraits of one or two of the students done with miraculously few strokes in what seemed mere minutes. The fee for students was $4 a month, or a dollar a week.
Those young Americans at work with Carolus-Duran in the spring of 1874 included several of marked ability and substantial prior training. Before coming to Paris, Will Low had been supporting himself as an illustrator in New York. J. Alden Weir had grown up drawing and painting under the guidance of his father, a noted artist who taught drawing at West Point. James Carroll Beckwith had studied for three years at Chicago’s Academy of Design and a year at the National Academy in New York.
But none among them showed anything like the ability of John Singer Sargent, as was evident from the morning he first entered the atelier that May. Years later, recalling the “advent” of Sargent, Beckwith said it was either a Tuesday or a Friday, the days when Carolus came to criticize the work.
I had a place near the door, and when I heard a knock I turned to open it. There stood a grey-haired gentleman, accompanied by a tall, rather lank youth who carried a portfolio under his arm, and I guessed he must be a coming nouveau. This gentleman addressed me politely in French, and I replied in the same language, but with less fluency. … He evidently saw that I was a fellow countryman, for he then spoke in English and we held a short conversation in subdued tones. … Carolus soon finished his criticism, and I presented my compatriots. Sargent’s father explained that he had brought his son to the studio that he might become a pupil. The portfolio was laid on the floor, and the drawings were spread out. We all crowded about to look, and … [we] were astonished. …
There were paintings of nudes, portrait studies, copies in oil and watercolor of Tintoretto and Titian, sketches in watercolor of scenes and figures in Venice, Florence, and Rome. Long afterward Will Low could still feel the “sensation” of the moment.
The master studied these many examples of adolescent work with keenest scrutiny, then said quietly, “You desire to enter the atelier as a pupil of mine? I shall be very glad to have you do so.” And within a few days he joined the class.
Having a foundation in drawing which none among his new comrades could equal, this genius—surely the correct word—quickly acquired the methods then prevalent in the studio, and then proceeded to act as a stimulating force which far exceeded the benefits of instruction given by Carolus himself.
At age eighteen Sargent looked even younger. He was just over six feet tall, extremely well-mannered, multilingual, and considered himself an American though he had never been to the United States and spoke with an English accent. He had spent his whole life in Europe. His expatriate mother and father had been wandering about Europe, moving from one city or spa to another for twenty years, according to the seasons of the year, always in search of a more amenable climate or more economical accommodations, seldom settling anywhere for long. They never found reason to be anywhere for long. John, who was born in Rome, had lived in Florence, London, Paris, various cities in Spain, Pau, Biarritz, Salzburg, Nice, St. Moritz, Venice, Lake Maggiore, Dresden, then Florence again before his return to Paris in 1874.
His father, Dr. FitzWilliam Sargent, who gave up a Philadelphia medical practice at age thirty-two, had long since grown weary of such self-imposed exile. “I am tired of this nomadic sort of life,” he had written from Florence to his mother in the fall of 1870.
The spring comes and we strike our tents and migrate for the summer. The autumn returns and we must again pick up our duds and be off to some milder region. … I wish there were some prospect of our going home and settling down among our own people and taking permanent root.
It was not the romantic expatriate life commonly imagined, free from the constraints of provincial America. In many ways it was a captive life and his a sad case. His wife, Mary Singer Sargent, had no desire to go home. She adored Europe—its art and music were the stuff of life for her. She sketched and painted quite well in watercolor. She loved to entertain, loved to shine in cultivated circles. She also suffered spells of bad health, as did John’s two younger sisters, Emily and Violet, and so they needed Europe for their health, she insisted, and flatly refused to go home.
Further, there was the matter of money. If one managed one’s resources prudently in Europe, one could not only get by but keep up appearances at far less expense than at home, and there was great appeal in that alone. Were one to return to the United States, one’s financial deficiencies would soon become all too apparent, and appearances mattered exceedingly to Mary Sargent. Since it was her money they were living on, not her husband’s, her wishes prevailed.
As FitzWilliam wrote privately, “Mary’s income is only such as enables us to live on with constant effort to spend as little as possible. …” That income was approximately seven hundred dollars a year.
Mary was short, round, ruddy-faced, and brimful of joie de vivre when feeling well. He was lean, grey, austere, and melancholy. John’s only known portrait of his father, done a few years later, might have been titled A Study in Sadness. Everything about the long, thin face is downcast—the eyes and mouth, the drooping walrus mustache.
The joy of the parents in their children was expansive nonetheless, and in “Johnny” increasingly as his exceptional talent became ever more evident.
As a small boy, he had filled his schoolbooks with so many drawings his teachers despaired of his ever learning what was printed in them. He seemed not ever to have been unaware of beauty, a cousin, Mary Hale, later wrote. His first memory, he told her, was of a deep red cobblestone in the gutter of the Via Tornabuoni in Florence of a color so beautiful that he thought of it constantly and begged his nurse to take him to see it on their daily walks.
Seeing how advanced he was for his age, his mother insisted he draw and paint nearly every day. “Drawing seems to be his favorite occupation and I think he has the elements of a good artist,” FitzWilliam wrote proudly to his own father, adding in a summary appraisal what numbers of others were to say as time passed. “He is a good boy withal, and everyone seems to like him.”
He did well in school, in Latin and Greek, geography, history, and European languages. He loved music, learned to play the piano and mandolin. He also studied art in school and with tutors during the summer months. “I see myself that he studies well and with pleasure,” FitzWilliam reported, “and that he is very much pleased with his teachers—which is almost as essential to progress as that his teachers should be pleased with him.”
His mother went sketching with him, insisting always that no matter how many drawings or watercolors he began each day, one at least must be finished.
By thirteen the boy knew he wanted an artist’s life more than any other and both mother and father strongly encouraged him. In Flor
ence in the winter of 1870 he was enrolled in classes at the Accademia di Belle Arti and on spring days went sketching with his mother in the Boboli Gardens.
Then in the spring of 1874 the whole family moved to Paris. “We hear that the French artists, undoubtedly the best now-a-days, are willing to take pupils in their studies,” John himself explained to a cousin. On May 19, FitzWilliam informed his father from Paris, “We came on here especially to see if we could not find greater advantages for John in the matter of his artistic studies.…” But to locate somewhere “comfortably and cheaply” proved difficult, “everything in the way of lodgings being very dear.”
A “smallish” apartment was found on the rue Abbatrice, close to the Champs-Élysées, and seemed near to heaven except for a nurse (to look after the young Violet), a “hard customer” who came with the apartment and soon had to be fired. She loved telling them in detail how she witnessed the whole rise and reign of the Commune and how much she had enjoyed it. She described the burning of the Hôtel de Ville and the Palace of the Tuileries and said she would love to see it all again. “So,” explained FitzWilliam, “we were afraid to trust the child to her, lest she would sell or otherwise dispose of our flesh and blood.”
As for Paris, he was exceedingly happy to be back. He genuinely liked and admired the French.
Paris is judged unfairly, I am convinced. Behind the gaiety, vice and debauchery which floats on the surface and which the transient comer only sees … there is a solid substratum of honesty and probity and economy and virtue, of intelligent, honest hard-work, and of indefatigable search for truth in morals and happiness and domestic virtues equal to what can be found anywhere in the world. …
The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris Page 38