Word: cassatt
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...another painting from 1878, the "Portrait of a Little Girl," Cassatt goes even further with her color experimentations. This rather large painting employs one of Cassatt's most typical subjects: a young child engaged in a natural activity--in this case, lounging informally on a comfortable blue chair. While the girl is clearly the subject of the painting, Cassatt forces her to the side, filling the canvas with four ponderous blue sofa-chairs. The outrageous multicolored upholstery patterns, painted in thick, indelicate slashes, dominate the surface of the painting and seem disconnected from the fabric of the sofas, almost...
...missed at this exhibit is Cassatt's beautiful but lesser known series of drypoint and aquatint color prints from 1890-91. These prints, inspired by a similar series of woodblock prints by the Japanese artist Kitigawa Utamaro, depict daily domestic scenes of female life. Subdued colors and clean lines give these prints a charming simplicity. But the Museum of Fine Arts has not done the best possible job of showing the close links between Cassatt's style and the style of the original Japanese prints that inspired her. At the Art Institute of Chicago, where the Cassatt exhibit first opened...
...nearly 100 paintings, pastels and prints at the MFA trace Cassatt's development from her early, more academic style into her Impressionistic experimentation. The second gallery, for example, contains several portraits of women and men in opera boxes. Unlike Edgar Degas's well-known behind-the-scenes pictures of ballerinas, Cassatt concentrates on the audience...
...Woman in a Loge" a young woman in her 20s sits in her theater box facing us, wearing an off-the-shoulder pink gown and holding her fan on her lap. Even here, Cassatt is already experimenting with color. Cassatt employs bright tones; a red flower on the woman's dress echoes the rich red of the velvet chair behind her. More striking, however, than Cassatt's choice of bright colors is her manner of achieving these tones. The blues and yellow of the theatre walls, reflected in a mirror behind the young woman, reappear as blue and yellow tones...
...course, the exhibit also contains a large number of Cassatt's signature portraits of young children, often painted together with their mother or nurse. Unlike so many other portraits of children, from the Renaissance through her own time, Cassatt's children actually look like children. Unlike previous painters, she does not paint children with adult facial expressions and proportion. Perhaps best among these paintings is the well-known "The Child's Bath" of 1893, which displays a nurse or mother tenderly holding a child on her lap as she begins to wash the little girl's feet. The girl calmly...