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MARY CASSATT
Woman in Black/Femme en noir (c 1882)
Oil on pale primed canvas
100.6cm X 74cm/39 3/4in X 29in

Mary Cassatt came from a wealthy family near Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania, and early on showed her determination to pursue a career in art by enrolling at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, apparently against her father's wishes. It was still unusual, not to say unconventional, for women of middle-class origins to desire or seek a profession at that time, for ladies were not expected to do paid work. If they did, their social status suffered. In Europe, where Cassatt went after four years' study in Pennsylvania, it was easier for a woman to become an artist, as Cassatt her-self stressed: 'After all give me France. Women do not have to fight for recognition here if they do serious work.'

Her first travels in Europe from 1866, were to study the Old Masters, for relatively few examples of their works were then available to American students on their own continent. During the Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune of 1870-1871, Cassatt went back to America, returning to Europe when hostil-ities ceased. She then went first to Italy, spend-ing eight months studying the work of the proto-Baroque painter Correggio (cl489-1534) in Parma. In 1873 she, like Manet earlier, went to Spain to learn from the art of Velazquez in Seville and Madrid. Her earliest entries to the Salon exhibitions, from 1872, show the influ-ence of Manet's 1860s Spanish themes and style. After a visit to Belgium and Holland to study the art of painters like Rubens, she finally settled in Paris.

Her meeting with Degas, and through him the Impressionists, in 1877 meant that, like Gustave Caillebotte, Cassatt was a relative latecomer to the Impressionist group. At Degas' invitation she began exhibiting with them in 1879. Degas had seen her entry to the 1874 Salon, and commented 'There is some-one who feels as I do', a remark which gains resonance in view of their lifelong friendship, which evolved from the time of their meeting. Cassatt later recalled 'I already knew who were my true masters. I admired Manet, Courbet and Degas. I hated conventional art. I began to live.' In common with Degas. Cassatt felt that art should be based on a solid study of the Old Masters, on disciplined work from the model, and on complete mastery of line, color and compositional organization.

Unlike Degas, her circumscribed social posi-tion as a middle-class woman meant that her range of subject matter was limited. For while men like Degas had unrestricted access not only to teaching studios where the life model was used, they could also hire male or female models to pose nude in their own studios. For women, who were not even permitted to be alone in a room with a man if he were not a relative, work even from clothed male models was unacceptable. Thus Cassatt's chief subjects - domestic interiors, women reading and isyi-doing needlework, mothers and children and hermiddle-class leisure activities indoors and out - were determined by what was appropriate for cad-a woman of her class at that time. These rentlystraints resulted in a great awareness in sual,Cassatt of the oppression of women, and she i ofaligned herself openly with the American struggle for women's suffrage.

Her earliest techniques owe much to Spanish art and to Manet. Her palette was then still dominated by somber hues which created a stark fall of light and shade reminiscent of Manet and which reflected the studio environnment. Bright colors - reds, blues, greens sang out in works like Torero and Young Girl (1873) against the subdued foil of dark hues and a plain background. Her figures were treated close up to the picture surface, large in scale, dominating the picture space with lively strength. As her style developed, she gradually abandoned the tonal palette for an Impressionist palette of pale tints, bright colors, and colorful rather than brown shadows. As Degas noted around 1890, Cassatt became preoccupied with the 'reflections and shadows on skin and costumes' in her sitters, which she handled with the opaque color mixtures characteristic of Impressionism.

Like Manet, Degas, Renoir and Cezanne, Cassatt never abandoned the use of black, as can be seen from her Woman in Black. But, like them, she used it as a color in its own right, not as a substance to tone down and sully pure color, for use in shadows. Her composition here is typically taut and carefully calculated in relation to the canvas edges and shape. The figure is pushed close to the canvas surface, filling the space. Her coiled hair is close to the top edge, and her elbow, positioned close to the right edge of the canvas, creates a precise tension. The elongated format of the standard vertical landscape canvas 40 (100x73cm/39^ x29in) aptly suits the tense upright pose of the sitter. This vertical emphasis is strength-ened by the position of her right arm, creating a vertical to left of the center of the picture, which ends in the stark contrast of the flesh tints of her hanging hand against the mixed alizarin and black colors of the dress.

The unfinished state of the picture, whose sitter remains unknown, provides ample evi-dence of Cassatt's working methods. Both dry-ish and fluid lines, laid rapidly, indicate the contours of the figure and chair, while the rudiments of the interior are loosely summar-ized, not by broad washes of color, but by chalky, dragged undiluted color scrubbed hastily onto the surface. Logically with a por-trait, the bulk of the paint build-up is concentrated on the head and figure, with the face brought to a fair degree of completion.

Cassatt's brushwork is broad and decisive, and the varied width of her brushes, from the fine contour strokes to the wide strokes on the dress, are clearly discernible. Her characteristic handling of flesh, as in the sitter's left hand. where the wet paint has been pulled and blurred across the original contour line, dates from around 1880. It was probably achieved by stroking the wet color with a clean, dry hog's hair brush, so that it smoothed the separ-ate touches of color, blending them together, and adding a softening sense of captured move-ment to the crisp underdrawing. Cassatt's changes to the left elbow, which are still visible, indicate her concern over the position of the arm, and the foreshortening of the forearm, in relation to the canvas edge. Her awareness of the visual power of the void. the shape created between objects, is clear in her careful structur-ing of this part of the composition. This relation-ship between object and void, exploited also by Degas and Cezanne in particular, is apparent in her finished compositions, like Girl in an Armchair, (1878).

Mary Cassatt's historical position as an important member of the Impressionist group has suffered because, both as a woman artist and as an American in Paris, her work did not fall into any simple art historical category. How-ever. the strength and originality of her art. which included printmaking and pastels, provide indisputable evidence of her stature as an artist.

The unfinished nature of Cassatt's portrait clearly shows her method of working. Contours of the form were laid in and later strengthened with dilute color-probably a mixture of burnt alizarin crimson and black. This same color was used to lay in themasses of the figure's somber costume. but the subtlety of the mixed hue means that undue harshness is avoided. All parts of the figure handled in this first ebauche were then left to dry, and certain areas, notably the head, were then scraped down. Some of the scraped areas of the head are still apparent among the incomplete final touches. Parts of the background were sketchedin broadly in thicker paint, which has been dragged across the fine but grainy canvas texture. In the upper and lower right of the picture, the oatmeal color of the thin ground remains uncovered. To the left of the head, the background was roughed in with an opaque pinky gray color. Thicker opaque color was also built up on the face, hands and chair. In the flesh areas, Cassatt's characteristic dragging of the wet colors, a personal variant of the old technique of blending, was used to soften and blur the initial vigorous handling of the form. The painting was executed on a standard format vertical landscape 40 canvas.

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