Home Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Prints Artists Womanshow 2000 Spaightwood Galleries Mary Cassatt (American, 1844-1926) Mary Cassatt was the only American to exhibit with the Impressionist group. A close friend of Degas, who immortalized her with his famous portrait of her working in the Louvre, she was not only an important painter, but a superb printmaker and draftsman, whose work shows the impact that Japanese woodcuts had on French artists, especially the Impressionists. She is best known for her portraits of children and her groupings of mothers and their children. At the moment, Spaightwood has seven of her drypoints (one in two different impressions in black and white, another in two different impressions, one of which is in color; we are also expecting to receive another color impression, Sara Smiling , within a week to 10 days), all of which are shown below. Our apologies for the quality of the digital photographs below: Cassatt favored blue-green, blue-gray, and off-white papers, and our competence with Photoshop is not up to fixing it (yet!) According to Cassatt's correspondence, she had originally only pulled one or two proofs from these plates. Nearly 20 years later, she found the plates in her storeroom and asked Eugene Delatre, the best known printer in Paris at the time, to print a small edition of each for her. One of her patrons, Mrs. Havemeyer, insisted that since the plate had already been printed, Cassatt had to indicate that by dating the print when she signed it; Cassatt insisted that she had never printed the plate before and refused, accusing Mrs. Havemeyer of trying to cheat her by paying her less for the works as if they were second editions. Having refused to date them, she decided not to sign them at all (a not-uncommon way of publishing prints at the time: Chagall's | |
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