Mary Cassatt
In 1891, Cassatt exhibited a set of ten color prints at the Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris. All depict women engaged in everyday activities, with four using mirrors to extend and complicate the pictorial space. This intimate scene echoes woodcuts by Kitagawa Utamaro (you can check out his works in our Archive!) showing courtesans at their toilette, examples of which the artist owned and admired. Here, a half-dressed woman sits before a looking glass and arranges her hair as she gazes down at her lap.
Cassatt was inspired by an 1890 exhibition of ukiyo-e images that took place in the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) in Paris. Ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world", as they were evocatively called) were comprised mostly of scenes of urban bourgeois pleasure—geishas, beautiful women, sumo wrestlers, and kabuki actors—and pictures of the natural beauty around Edo (present day Tokyo)—the mists of Mount Fuji, cherry blossoms, rain showers, and surging waves along the port of Kanagawa.
If you would like to learn more about Mary Cassatt's interest in Japanese art, check out our Mega Impressionism Course here. : )
P.S. Read a biographical article and get to know Cassatt's full story: here.
Because we just had our 9th birthday we want to give a spotlight to our new venture! We want to offer to you 9 masterpieces for our 9th birthday that you can buy as fine art prints! Their quality is so amazing that you can track every brush stroke made by the artist. We are also using papers and water-based inks of the best quality. You won't find anything like this in museum shops! Each is available in a limited edition of 100. You can see and read more about them here