Artist Mary Cassatt in Spain

The Seville Paintings

Feb 25, 2009 Meg Nola

Best known for her loving scenes of mothers and children, Mary Cassatt also painted an 1873 series of Spanish works that showed an adventurously emerging talent.

Mary Stevenson Cassatt was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1844. She studied at The Pennsylvania Academy of The Fine Arts and later joined the French Impressionist school of painters, a group which included Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Gustave Caillebotte and Edgar Degas.

Spanish Scenes

As a young woman, Cassatt was determined not to let her gender keep her from becoming a serious artist. Following her graduation from the Pennsylvania Academy, she trained with Academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris, and in 1872 she visited Italy and Spain to study the works of the Old Masters. In Madrid, Mary greatly admired the 17th century art of Diego Velázquez at the Museo del Prado. Mary was perhaps also inspired to travel to Spain by the work that Edouard Manet had exhibited following his 1865 Spanish visit. Manet had a strong influence on younger painters of his time, and his striking Dead Toreador and The Bullfight had no doubt caught Mary’s eye.

The Spanish culture and visual landscape were exciting to Mary and after Madrid she went further to Seville. Mary’s subtlety comes through in her 1873 painting Spanish Dancer Wearing a Lace Mantilla, while her skill with color and detail can be seen in On the Balcony, where two young women flirt with a suitor. Cassatt captures the flowered dresses, bright shawls and coy expressions of the women, while making the male presence less facially detailed yet still dominating as he extends his arm proprietarily. The woman in red seems wistful as the man focuses attention on her companion, and she gazes down at life beyond her railed perch with perhaps a longing to find a truer love.

In the same year’s Offering the Panale to the Bullfighter, Cassatt set up a scene between another woman with a flower in her dark hair giving a bullfighter a panale, or sweet treat. In this painting, Cassatt minimizes the girl while fully showing the bullfighter, his expression just a shade arrogant and expectant. He is, after all, a brave bullfighter and women surely adore him. Cassatt again offers a fine sense of masculine/feminine physical stances, with the bullfighter’s dominant posture and the woman’s more yielding position.

After the Bullfight

Cassatt’s After the Bullfight could be considered her most intriguing Spanish-influenced painting, mainly because of the artistic statement it makes. In Mary Cassatt’s day, a kind of artistic decorum allowed men to paint nudes, dancers, actresses, or whatever female they happened to be obsessed with — as long as the work kept within the boundaries of what was then considered decency. 19th century women artists, however, generally had to limit their paintings to still-lifes, landscapes, classical or Biblical scenes, portraits of other women, children or animals, with maybe an occasional husband, brother or fatherly study. In Cassatt’s After the Bullfight, a toreador smokes a cigarette and savors his latest triumph. He looks confident both inside the arena and beyond it, yet he is not a romantic caricature. Here Cassatt not only chose a subject equal to the Spanish works of Manet, she asserted her right as a female artist to depict a virile and attractive man.

Cassatt’s knowledge of bullfighters is presumed to not have come from actual attendance but from Théophile Gautier’s 1845 Travels in Spain. Gautier’s guidebook gives extensive and graphic details of the bullfight tradition and the ornate outfits of those involved, noting how the toreador “has no defensive armour, he is dressed as if for a ball…a pin could pierce his satin jacket; all he has is a bit of stuff and a frail sword.” Gautier also notes the crowd’s enjoyment of the sport’s violence and love for the man who either kills or is gored by the enraged and tormented bull.

Back to Paris

After her Spanish sojourn, Mary Cassatt returned to Paris. She was eventually invited to exhibit independently with the French Impressionists by artist Edgar Degas, and she would become close friends with Degas and linked with the Impressionist group throughout the rest of her life.

Sources

• After the Bullfight, Interpretive Resource – The Art Institute of Chicago
• Offering the Panale to the Bullfighter – The Clark Art Institute

The copyright of the article Artist Mary Cassatt in Spain in Modern Art History is owned by Meg Nola. Permission to republish Artist Mary Cassatt in Spain in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

After the Bullfight (Mary Cassatt, 1873)

On the Balcony (Mary Cassatt, 1873)

Self Portrait (Mary Cassatt, 1878)