Author Description

The contrast between, on the one hand, Mary Cassatt's social background and choice of subjects and, on the other, her career in a male environment, gave rise to debates and different positions on her feminist commitment. Mary Cassatt, who grew up in an upper-middle-class family, gained access to knowledge that gradually became available to women and attended Parisian artistic circles, but did not abandon her social status. If she entertained artists in her home, she did not attend cafés or café concerts, and the subjects of her paintings concern mainly her social sphere: portraits of women and children of the bourgeoisie in their daily activities. This apparent conformism has been highlighted by some critics: the Joris-Karl Huysmans praises her, saying that only a woman could paint childhood thanks to her maternal abilities, the art historian John Walker sees in her choice of subjects the regrets of a woman who missed out on life as a wife and mother, and Edgar Robertson hints that this hackneyed subject matter ultimately generates boredom. Biographers such as Achille Segard or Frederick Sweet welcome the artist but see her as a charming, very Victorian person. Conversely, feminist groups, starting with her suffragette friend Louisine Havemeyer, then later writers such as Griselda Pollock, Susan G. Lindsay, or Nancy Maule Matthews, emphasize her ability to assert herself in an environment of men and to gain her independence in life from her art. She was one of the few female Impressionist artists, along with Berta Morisot, Marie Bracquemond, and Eva Gonzales, at a time when prejudice attributed creative genius and culture only to men (leaving it to women's sensibilities to interpret their artistic subjects). Degas himself, in front of Cassatt's work, allows himself this denunciatory comment: "I cannot allow a woman to paint so well". As for her choice of subjects, they stress that women were limited in that they could not paint portrait