Word: cassatts
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...heroines of my adolescence were artists, rather than adventure-seekers. I admired their creations and their professionalism rather than their personal lives, of which I often knew little beyond the myth of la vie boheme. I looked at Mary Cassatt's Impressionis paintings, I mooned over Emily Dickinson's poems, absurdly imitated Isadora Duncan's dances, and I rea a little Gertrude Stein, mostly impressed that any woman could be quite so charismatic and commanding. I respected their sensitivity without really wondering how they kept their flame going during the crises of everyday life...
...they emphasize the women's struggles to learn and achieve recognition in a craft, as well as the sweet smell of their success; they record the traumas as well as the blessings that haunt the artistic soul. Biographer Frederick Sweet, for instance, describes the decade of apprenticeship which Mary Cassatt had to endure before Degas asked her to exhibit with the Impressionists. Later, Sweet adds how Cassatt's work deteriorated as she grew blind near the end of her life, and then, a bit ungenerously, how "friends from America found her querulous and vindictive." Albert Gelpi's portrait of Emily...
Even an arrangement of the paintings by donors could have commented on the taste of particular families. The elaborate Toilet of Venus was donated by Wiliam K. Vanderbilt. Mary Cassatt, the American Impressionist, helped the Havemeyer family choose the works of Spanish artists. El Greco's View of Toledo is part of the 1929 Havemeyer bequest: a view of Mary Cassatt's judgment...
...taste is seen in the private sitting room and long hall. She has kept the Early American masterworks acquired by Jacqueline Kennedy and earlier tenants, but she particularly likes Impressionists and turn-of-the-century Americans. Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum has lent the White House Mary Cassatt's Portrait of a Young Girl, Ernest Lawson's Harlem River, one Sargent and two Monets...
Electra Webb loved to talk in such proverbs, and the new memorial building at Shelburne faithfully reflects her homespun, silver-spoon style. The Rembrandts in the living room complement a Chippendale sofa covered in needlepoint, an English secretary and an English gaming table. Mary Cassatt's pastel of Electra's mother hangs in her bedroom. Desk and dresser tops are crowded with silver-framed photographs of her children and grandchildren-and a white satin pillow on the bed bears the red-embroidered maxim: "We live in deeds, not years...