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Cassatt is a very difficult artist.

There is something difficult and
ugly about her work

that is for me
as a scholar very intriguing.

Makes me want to look more,
makes me want to understand more.

She frustrates a lot of people,

and I wanna
understand that frustration.

There's something challenging about
her work that keeps me looking,

keeps me coming back.

Women have been making art as long
as art has been being made,

but they have simply been
boxed out institutionally.

Looking at her art
and looking at her work

and her thinking,

it tells us a lot about our ideas
about womanhood

and challenges our ideas
about gender

and women
and what they're capable of.

I have a very special
relationship to this painting.

It's such an ambiguous painting
in some way, and it's so intriguing,

and whenever I started looking at
it, I always felt like

there was something I wasn't
getting, something was missing.

So, when I came to the gallery

to work in the department
of French paintings,

it was really because I wanted to
understand this painting

and what it
tells us about Cassatt as an artist

and as a political thinker.

(REFLECTIVE PIANO MUSIC)

Mary Stevenson Cassatt was born
in 1844 in Allegheny City,

part of modern Pittsburgh,

to a very distinguished family
of French and Irish descent.

Her parents met
and married in Pittsburgh,

which was a bustling
transportation hub.

If you travelled up the Mississippi
to the Ohio to Pittsburgh,

you could get practically any
product in the country

to the Northeast.

And that's exactly
what her father did.

He was what was called
a forwarding merchant.

His company would buy these goods

and then resell them
to factories in the Northeast.

That was a very lucrative
profession.

And her mother was the daughter of
the first president

of the Pittsburgh National Bank.

So her father was the king
of Pittsburgh in that sense,

and she grew up the princess.

They had investment in their DNA.

They prospered in that area
and then moved out.

They arrived in Philadelphia.

They were definitely part
of an educated

and wealthy community in the city
that was the centre of the art world

in the United States
in the 1850s and '60s.

Her
parents are friends with collectors,

some of the best collectors
in the United States at the time,

and you can imagine a young girl,

a young teenager going to their
homes

and being exposed to these
small collections of excellent art.

She knew that she wanted to become
an artist,

having had that
experience as a young woman,

and then seeking out a place
in Philadelphia

where she could train
professionally.

She knew what she wanna do,

and she knew the direction
that she had to take.

So when she was 15,

she signed up for classes at the
Pennsylvania Academy

in Philadelphia.

ANNA: It was only beginning
in the 1840s that women could study

at the Pennsylvania Academy
of the Fine Arts.

There was a group of very few women
in Philadelphia

that would have been in the 1860s

thinking about a
professional career as artists.

Women artists
would not have been something

she would have been exposed to
a lot.

So there was no real model for her

for women artists
exhibiting portraits

or history paintings

or landscapes or anything like that
in Philadelphia.

The ambitious teenager yearned for
a more independent artistic community

and unlimited access
to the very best art.

Once the American Civil war had
ended in 1865,

Cassatt wasted little time in
boarding the transatlantic steamer

to Europe.
Escorted by her mother,

the 21-year-old arrived in Paris
just before Christmas.

For the wealthy, Paris under Napoleon
III was an exciting place to be.

Many Americans lived in the city,

providing the Cassatts access to an
established social scene of parties

and dinners.

The city's architecture was
undergoing regeneration

as Paris showed its prosperity to the
world through its decorative arts

and material culture.

One of the biggest things for her
was going to the Louvre.

She went daily to the Louvre.

She was a registered student,
and she would go

and basically just absorb the old
masters like a sponge.

She thought that was very,
very important.

There actually was quite a community
of women in Paris

that would often take lodgings
together

and that would be painting at
the Louvre,

hire models maybe share
the costs of models.

And then, of course,
the great goal

of all of that painting was to have
your work exhibited at the Salon.

The Salon was an annual exhibition,
every spring in Paris,

essentially the big
event of the art world.

This was a moment when private
dealers were only starting

to gain ground.
So if you wanted to sell your work,

the Salon was really the key place.

But cracks in the Salon system
were beginning to show.

Many artists accused the French
government,

which indirectly controlled the Salon
selection jury,

of being overly strict

and conservative in the face
of changing artistic styles.

Feeling
the need to expand her education,

in February 1867,

Cassatt decided to leave the formal
class environment of the city

and head to the countryside.

She sought teaching
from Thomas Couture,

renowned as Edouard Manet's master,

and went on to educate
herself in genre painting

by living in an artist's colony in
the small village of Ecouen,

north of Paris.

Couture, at the time,
was considered a bit of a rebel,

and he lived outside of Paris
in this countryside

where a lot of
genre painters had set up shop.

He was classically trained,

but his style was softer

and more lively.

Lots of stories, peasant life,

charming, exotic,

that kind of thing.

It was amongst this colony of artists
that she found the inspiration

for one of her first canvases...

The Mandolin Player, painted in 1868.

It is one of the very few Cassatt
works that survive

from her early career.

Her first work to be
accepted into the Salon,

The Mandolin Player,
is really more in a Couture style.

It's peasant life,

it's genre, quote unquote,

but it is more monumental.

It's a painting
that shows potential.

There aren't many early works
from Cassatt,

partly by misfortune and partly by
design. In her later years,

she talks in her correspondence
about wanting to destroy things.

This is not uncommon. Artists
oftentimes get rid of things.

She just did not want those to be
the works that she's remembered for.

Despite early success,

Cassatt's next few submissions
to the Salon were rejected.

Then, in 1870,

the Franco-Prussian war broke out.

Over the next eight months,
the city was devastated by siege

and then civil war.

Many thousands chose to flee.

Cassatt was among them
and packed up her paintings

and left for the safety
of Philadelphia.

Back in her homeland,
Cassatt tried to sell work,

desperate to prove to her family
that painting could be her career.

She sent two works to a dealer
in New York and got rejected.

She sought commissions
in Pittsburgh with no success.

She did get her
works displayed in Chicago,

but they burned
in the Great Chicago Fire.

All of this served to convince
Cassatt that she belonged in Europe.

A fortuitous meeting with a priest
and a new friend,

the artist Emily Sartain,

led to a change in her luck.

While she was in Pittsburgh,

she apparently got the priest
of the Catholic cathedral

to commission her to
do a copy of a Correggio painting

in Parma in Italy,

and Emily wanted to go to Europe,

and it turned out to be
a great experience for both of them.

They were able to study with some
of the major teachers in Parma

and also see the art in Italy,

primarily Correggio.

But instead of working on the copies
she had been commissioned for,

Cassatt began enthusiastically
working on a picture of her own.

What I love about this painting is
how it really demonstrates

how Cassatt was able to bring
together

both the lessons of the old masters
and the incredible attention

that she gives too to the
modern pictorial lessons

that she's learning from having
spent time in Paris.

In 1872,
Cassatt is around 28 years old.

She had a childhood travelling
throughout Europe.

But her real immersion in European
art really begins

when she starts to travel
through Italy,

especially in Parma and Rome,

and then later in Spain,
especially in Seville.

She's carefully studying
Correggio in Parma

and we can really see the influence
of Correggio here

and everything that she would have
been absorbing in the galleries,

in all of the cathedrals.

She's chosen an impossibly tricky
composition here

with this position of the figure
in the foreground.

If you look at where her
arm begins at her shoulder,

it's coming out into space, then
doubling back on itself,

and then her hand finally is coming
back yet again,

this third serpentine line.

She's challenging herself to have
more complicated compositions

than she's ever dealt with before.

The quality of the painting
is remarkable.

She's able to modulate her brush
work so rapidly

between the rough execution of the
flowers as they're falling,

which really gives a sense of motion

and energy and activity

versus the incredible fine-ness
with which the faces are painted.

We can see her absorbing the early
lessons of figural realism,

certainly the lessons of Caravaggio
and the Mannerists.

But we can also see her looking
closely at Manet,

who was also interested in these
dark portrait spaces,

the space of the studio.

At the same time, we can see her
dedication to the figure

as her most beloved subject.

So she's terribly interested in not
only the history of European art

but also what's becoming popular
in Paris at the time.

Cassatt continued to travel
throughout Europe,

absorbing and studying every genre of
art

and Old Master painting
she could find.

In 1874, after her European jaunt,

she returns to Paris, and
that's where she settles herself,

and she actually remains more or
less in Paris until her death,

apart from a very occasional
trips to the US

and other parts of France.

She'd realised by that point
that she needed to be in Paris,

both for the proximity to the Salon

and the opportunity to show her
work there,

but also because it was it was such
a growing art community,

so it is essential for her to be
there, to make contacts

with other artists,
to get to know dealers

and to sell her work.

She, at that point,
was needing to support herself.

There many exciting things happening
in the world of art.

Particularly with the First
Impressionist's Exhibition in 1874,

and I think Cassatt was certainly
meeting other artists

and having
a variety of different experiences.

So there's really great dynamic art
going on. But at the same time,

the restrictions that she'd been
experiencing with the Salon jury,

with the conservativism that she saw
going on

was increasingly frustrating.

She was not being able to make her
mark. She couldn't break through.

"When I came to live in Paris,

"after having painted in Rome
and other places,

"the sight of the annual exhibitions
quite led me astray.

"I thought I must be wrong and the
painters admired by the public
right.

"It was then I fell in with our band

and took quite another direction."

Her multiple entries to the Salon
received a mixed reception

from the juries.

In 1874,

one work of hers
caught the eye of someone

who was to change the course
of her professional life.

Edgar Degas saw it.

The story that's been told is Degas
purportedly told a friend,

"There is someone who
feels as I do."

He put it in terms of sensibility,

that there is someone who is
a kindred spirit,

who sort of understands things
and feels the way I do.

And unfortunately,
because of the timing,

she was not in Paris for the first
impressionist show,

so she did not see it,
but she would see his art.

The story she recounts is seeing
one of his pastels in a shop window.

"I used to go and flatten my nose
against that window

"and absorb all I could of his art.

"I saw art
then as I wanted to see it."

It absolutely hit her
between the eyes.

She was absolutely wowed by it.

She had never seen anything
quite like this before.

His handling of colour,

the bending and twisting forms
of the little dancers of Montmartre,

this was a very, very unusual,

and she was absolutely fascinated.

It takes until 1877
when they finally meet,

and suddenly the whole
trajectory of her career changes.

Cassatt, over the course of the
next couple of years,

would get to know Degas personally,

and of course both of them
were rooted in painting figures,

both were very well educated.

So they had this sort of strong
sense of the art of the past

but were very keen to break away
from that.

Degas was very involved in inviting
new artists to join the exhibitions

that have become known
as the Impressionists exhibitions.

At that time, they were really known
as a group of independent artists,

and they really preferred to be
called the Independents.

And it took Cassatt two
years from Degas' invitation

to join the Impressionist exhibition
for her to make that decision,

that she would break from the Salon
and exhibit with the Impressionists.

"In 1877, I submitted again
to the Salon.

"They rejected it.

"That was when Degas made me promise
never to submit anything

"to the Salon again,
and to exhibit with his friends

"in the group of the Impressionists.

"I agreed gladly.

"At last I could work absolutely
independently

"without worrying about the possible
opinion of a jury!

"I had already acknowledged
who my true masters were.

"I admired Manet, Courbet and Degas.

"I hated conventional art.

"I was beginning to live."

When you look at the Little Girl
in a Blue Armchair,

you can see Impressionism.

You can see it in the handling
of the paint,

the fluidity of it,

the cropping of the composition,
the sort of very curious space,

the way the floor
is slightly tilted up.

The chairs are arranged oddly.

But at the same time,
it's very realist.

When you look at the little
girl in particular,

the way she sort of literally
is flopped on the chair

and her arms and legs akimbo.

This is a tired, bored,
annoyed little girl.

She's just thrown herself
on a couch.

It's very minimal.

Cassatt isn't working
on the little details.

There's actually very little in that
room,

and it is meant to be a traditional
bourgeois Paris interior.

She just focuses on the figures,

the dynamism of the colour

and the brushwork
and the truth of the painting.

When you look back at it,
it doesn't feel radical.

It was radical for her,

and we know from a letter Cassatt
wrote many years later, in 1903,

she talked about how that painting
had been rejected

for the World's Fair in 1878,
and she was particularly mad

because Degas had liked it,

and
Degas had worked on the background.

And that's very important because it
really sort of shows that by 1878,

they're working together.

Cultural life in Paris
was transforming.

Opera and theatre had
become a major pastime.

(HOOVES CLIP, CLOP)

Attracted as much by the
culture of display...

..the dazzling outfits
and opulent spaces,

the old and newly monied classes went
to view the entertainment

off the stage, as much as on it.

(GENTLE PIANO MUSIC)

The architecture
of the recently built opera house

and many of the theatres
encouraged this process of seeing

and being seen,

especially from the numerous small
balconies

from where one could study
the city's fashionable elite.

For the Impressionists, it was to be
a rich source of inspiration

for their depictions of modern life.

Cassatt enters her first
Impressionist exhibition in 1879.

She sends in 11 works,
paintings and pastels.

We think about this being her debut

with this group of independent
artists that, in fact,

one of the core subjects that
she exhibits there are young women,

perhaps making some of their debut
in society and going to theatre.

And so it's a whole series
of images in which

you see women enjoying the theatre,

looking out, perhaps
at the performance,

maybe hiding a little
bit behind fans and other instances.

There's something not only
about going out to see performance,

but, and this is what's so important
for Cassatt,

there's this duality of seeing
and being seen,

and that's what's so potent in her
paintings

is that you get a real sense of the
visibility of particularly women.

With In the Loge you have this
great triangulation of gazes.

The woman at the theatre,

and you can tell this is not
while things are going on on stage.

The house lights are up.
It's glaringly bright,

and yet she's looking so intensely

and intently
through her opera glasses.

She's observing one of the other
audience members.

And of course, at the same time,
far off in the distance,

you see a man leaning
over the balcony,

just staring so intently through his
own pair of binoculars at her.

And that has this effect of sort
of triggering this awareness

that we're doing the exact
same thing.

And yet Cassatt's brilliance
is that this figure

is completely unaffected by this.

She isn't concerned with how
she's being seen.

She's concerned with her
own looking,

to which we, no matter how hard we
look,

we don't have access to it.

And that's confounding
and frustrating.

Woman with a Pearl Necklace is most
likely a portrait of her sister,

Lydia, who was one
of her favourite subjects.

There's something about her red hair

and this complexion that she has
that is so striking

and so singular
that Cassatt herself shares.

She had this very rusty red hair.

And so there's something so brazen
about her depiction of Lydia

with this big smile on her face.

It was still very rare
to have a woman smiling like that

and not in a way that's
sort of pleasant and polite

but that is truly joyful,

of pleasure,
which feels a little intimate

and almost a little scandalising,

especially with that dress that is
draped off her shoulders.

And if we needed to be
reminded of her of her bare skin,

it's reflected
in the mirror behind her.

You can see her bare back.

The thing about that show was,
it actually was a success.

The 1879 Impressionist show was
really the first one to make money,

and she did get good notices from
the critics for the most part.

They talked about Miss Cassatt,
they talked about her originality,

so it proved finally that she
was on the right path,

that people were taking notice
and complimenting her work.

Cassatt showed as many
prints as pastels

and oil paintings in the 5th
Impressionist Exhibition in 1880,

including unfinished works,

which shocked the critics.

Undeterred, her
productivity continued to flourish,

as did her professional success

and she began to make sales

through the Impressionists'
tenacious dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel.

The shifting status, confidence

and economic opportunities for women
at the end of the century

led to the phrase "New Woman",

a subject that Cassatt
embraced in her work.

When you look at her
interior scenes,

they don't seem modern to our eyes,

they seem very conservative,
very old fashioned,

but what's striking about them
is Cassatt as a woman,

how she perceives these scenes.

This is the sphere in which she
lived as a woman

of her social class,
a woman who was unmarried.

She had limits placed on her
by society

where was appropriate
for her to go.

So the world that she had were
areas like the home,

even though she never had children
of her own,

that was the world she inhabited.

And so she would
focus on the interaction.

The psychology of the people.

She is very skilled at communicating
the internal life

through the external within that
sphere

because it's very easy to think

that there was nothing
else behind the eyes.

They're pretty.
They care for the home,

but they're ultimately vapid
and have no intellectual life.

And Cassatt, of course,
knew perfectly well

that women had tremendous intellect,

tremendous thought capability.

And she wanted to tease that
out in her art

to show how
the personalities of these people

and the fact that they are thinking,

complex individuals, I think, is
really what makes her art so modern.

(GENTLE PIANO MUSIC)

Five O'Clock Tea
is a very funny picture,

and it was detested by critics
because it was so funny,

because it was so bizarre,

because it defies a lot of rules.

There's this tension
between intimacy

and inaccessibility

because, on the one hand, this is a
very feminine space of interaction,

of a domestic form of socialising.

And yet the two figures that she
paints are completely checked out.

One of them is looking off in the
other, totally other direction.

She's not even looking at her guest.

And the woman who's sitting directly
across from us has lifted her teacup

to block her face
so we can't see her.

When we think about the history
of painting portraits

or figure painting,
it's all about the face.

It's all about what
we can see on somebody's face

and how we read an expression.
And Cassatt has cut us off.

She is denying us that privilege,

which is what makes
that painting so frustrating.

She's certainly a beautiful
and talented painter,

but she doesn't make
things easy on us.

There was a tradition in late
19th-century French painting

of showing women reading.

So in that sense, Cassatt is
taking on a familiar subject.

She shows her mother
wearing glasses,

holding this newspaper,

and we very infrequently see women
reading newspapers

in paintings of this period.
They're more often reading novels

or
even reading illustrated journals.

Figaro is a paper that was
very much about politics.

It was about the economy
but really complex social issues.

The fact Cassatt has so firmly put
that paper in her mother's hands,

I think is making quite a powerful
statement about both her mother

as an individual but also about
the increasing engagement

that you see with women in politics
of the day

or even women sort of entering
professions of law and medicine.

She has all these women who are
incredibly serious that she paints.

They're always absorbed in whatever
they're doing,

whether that's reading or sewing

or knitting
or playing the banjo or drawing.

And there is never a moment that she
ever has to defend the idea

that women's work is serious work,

that women's lives
are serious lives.

It wouldn't have occurred to her
that it needed to be articulated,

because it was simply true.

It was simply a fact,

which makes it
almost all the more powerful.

In 1879, 1880, you could go to the
impressionist exhibitions,

and everybody was there.

Monet was there, Morisot was there,
Degas was there,

and you could see
a connection between their styles.

There was an energy
and an experimentation.

But by the early '80s,

all the artists are searching for a
kind of Anti-Impressionist style

that is also experimental

but is seemingly more eternal.

People like Gauguin, Van Gogh

and Cezanne were getting into their
mature Post-Impressionist styles,

and Cassatt was doing that too.

At the age of 42,

Cassatt was about to start a new
chapter as an independent artist.

(GENTLE PIANO MUSIC)

Woman Arranging
Her Hair is actually,

I think, one of the great
triumphs of Mary Cassatt's career.

The subject matter, Woman at Her
Toilette, has a long tradition.

What's interesting is
having a woman portraying a woman

at her toilette,
so it brings, you know,

a very personal understanding
to the subject.

What's interesting is the model is
not conventionally pretty.

She's actually arguably quite
homely with a slightly buck tooth.

But Cassatt makes her beautiful.

When you look at the line of her
arm,

the way she's arranging the hair...

..the pattern on the wallpaper,

every single element contributes
to creating this beautiful tableau.

I think the main distinction in how
Cassatt approaches an image

of a toilette or coiffure
is she doesn't sexualise it.

When a male artist does it,
invariably

there'll be lots of flesh
on display.

It's titillating. It's a painting
by a man for a male audience.

Cassatt's paintings are not
intended to be sexual.

In many ways,
they're very mundane,

part of a woman's daily practice,

is something
that she does every day.

It's trivial and banal.

The beauty
comes from the way it's portrayed,

the way it's composed,
the colours that she uses.

She does not want to titillate.

She does not want
to provoke a response.

During the mid-19th century,

Western art
saw the birth of Japonisme,

a term that referred to the European
craze for Japanese culture.

At a time when artists were rejecting
the traditional style of art,

the Japanese aesthetic seemed like
a breath of fresh air.

Artists like Cassatt and her
peers loved the stylisation

and the flat bold colours inspiring
them to try new compositions,

themes and techniques.

In April 1890,

a major exhibition of Japanese
woodcut prints opened

at Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

Hundreds of Ukiyo-e prints showing
scenes of everyday Japanese life

in vibrant colours and bold designs.

Profoundly moved by the spectacle of
colour

and craftmanship
she had witnessed at the exhibition,

Cassatt immersed herself
into a printing project

that would consume all of her time
an energy for the next nine months.

A series of colour prints showing
scenes

from the lives of modern women,

that would become among the most
valuable prints of the 19th century.

(CALMING MUSIC)

The colour on the ten
separate images

that create this suite of prints
are remarkable,

and there's a lot of variation among
even prints of the same subject.

She is fine tuning, she's applying
colour to the plates by hand.

And each colour has to be
applied on a separate plate.

So it's an incredibly sophisticated

and very complex,
multi-layered process.

And we know that she is
experimenting

and fine tuning the colours
on her own.

But when it comes time to print the
full edition of these colour prints,

and in order to produce 25 copies of
each of each image,

she works with a professional
printer at the time, Leroy.

Working at full speed,
the two of them together,

printer and artist are able
to create about eight

or nine impressions a day.

In the end,
in the final edition of the prints,

she names the printer as well as
herself. So she says,

"Printed by Mary Cassatt and Leroy,

"edition of 25,"
and then signs it Mary Cassatt.

Her prints were wildly successful,
and she knew it,

she was such a smart manipulator
of her own market.

She knew what was going to sell.

She decided to only sell
the set of ten as a set.

She didn't want to split it off.

This, first of all, guarantees
she's going to make more money,

because she's selling as sets, but
also sort of creates some demand

or mystique that these prints can
only be seen together as a set.

She was a very keen manipulator of
her own market in that in that way.

Cassatt was deeply dedicated
to the American suffrage movement,

even though she was living in
France,

and she had very strident beliefs
about the rights of women

and was often corresponding
with her American friends

about the importance
of the suffrage movement.

There's a wonderful letter that
Cassatt writes in the 1890s

about why she feels she'll never
return to the United States,

and it's because she feels that she
can be much freer in France.

And she says, "Only in France am
I being taken seriously as a person

"and not being treated
because of my gender."

She writes that women need to be
able to have a vote.

They need to be able to have a say
in what's going on

in the geopolitical
realities that they're living in.

They have to be able to help
determine

not only their own future
but the future of everybody.

(LIGHT PIANO MUSIC)

For Cassatt,
the mother and child subject

is one that she returns to again

and again in the last
decades of her career.

It's a moment
when there are great debates.

The International Women's Congress
is being formed,

and there's many conversations about
women's roles in raising children,

great efforts to try to
reduce infant mortality at the time.

Women of all classes
are being encouraged

to spend more time
with their children.

When you think about, like,
The Child's Bath, of 1893,

the great painting in Chicago,

it is capturing the moment in which
a mother has a child in her lap,

and it is very much
about engagement.

There's a great sense of touch that
comes out in that picture,

not only from the sense
of the various textiles

and the textures
there from the woman's garment

but also the touch
between the mother and the child.

I don't think it was always
a very happy

or comfortable experience
to be in Cassatt's studio,

because there are some stories about
children getting scolded by Cassatt,

because they're not doing what she
wants them to do.

And there's one account of a baby
that actually cried itself to sleep

because it was so frustrated with
the experience of modelling for her,

and that she decided
then to depict the child sleeping.

Children will never sit still,
they are fussy,

and they get bored,
and they get cranky,

and that's something that she
doesn't shy away from depicting.

This radical honesty about what
it's like to ask a child

to sit still and pose.

Cassatt paints
children as the difficult

and complicated beings
that they are.

I think one of the challenges
with Cassatt's mother

and children subjects is that she
did do it over a such a long period

of time, and they've been used so
often on greeting cards

or for the Mother's Day cards today

that I think we've become
so familiar with them

that we've
stopped in a way looking at them.

We think of her perhaps only as
painting mothers and children,

and perhaps we are less familiar
with also some

of the references she's recalling of
centuries of tradition

of painting the Madonna and child.

They always start out saying,

"Well, but she wasn't married
and she didn't have any children.

"So how is she qualified to paint
the subject?"

which of course is totally
ridiculous because Raphael,

Michelangelo, you know, all of those
childless, unmarried men,

everyone's perfectly happy to have
THEM painting mothers and children.

However,
they were immensely popular.

In terms of Durand-Ruel
taking her on,

this became a gold mine for him

because she just couldn't do enough
of them.

They always had a ready buyer.

People lined up
to get her next one.

She later on complained about that

because she said,
"I was led astray by the dealers."

I think in some ways,
she is a victim of her own success.

Those works were immensely popular.
They sold very well,

both in prints and paintings.
They were highly coveted,

but it's also lead over time to this
kind of reduction of her abilities,

that when you pick up any art
history textbook,

they will show you
a mother and child,

and that is all they will show you.

And over time,
that's all people know about her,

and it's tragically has
minimalised her importance.

It sort of sidelined her

because she seems like she's a
one-trick pony,

that she only can do one thing.

And there's a whole body of work
that's complex

and dynamic
and experimental and audacious.

Cassatt's reputation as one of
America's great artists

reached its
height in the new century,

as her pictures were being
hung in galleries around the world.

And in her adopted home,

she was awarded the coveted
Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur,

the highest French distinction
for civil accomplishments.

Now in her 60s and having
purchased a chateau of her own,

Cassatt's productivity continued
unabated as both artist

and advisor.

She was incredibly influential
as almost a dealer

and a promoter
of getting the Impressionists

into American collections.

So by encouraging her
friend, Louisine Havemeyer,

to meet European impressionists

and then getting that artwork
back into the United States,

Mary Cassatt and Havemeyer basically
formed some of the major collections

of art in the United States.

When you talk about her
legacy in American art history,

her career as a painter
and printmaker

versus the sort of side career
she had as an adviser to collectors

and not only
bringing in Impressionist paintings

and guiding rich
Americans to buy the impressionists

but also old Master paintings.

I don't know if you can actually
argue that one is more important

than the other in the grand scheme,

because what she did was phenomenal

and the fact that she could do two
things simultaneously,

create amazing works of art

but also help to support
and encourage

and form collections that would go
on to be the basis of museums

across the country, is phenomenal,

so people may not understand that
aspect as easily,

because they don't see on a name,

"Mary Cassatt advised the collector
who bought this painting,

"who then donated to the museum."
That's sort of the secret history.

But her fingerprints are all
through American collections

in ways that people
may not even know.

By the outbreak of World War I,

Cassatt's triumphs became
clouded by personal tragedy.

Devastated by the deaths of Degas,

Renoir and her remaining siblings,

she was also forced to flee her home

for the safety
of the south of France.

Cassatt's eyesight deteriorated over
the next decade

to the point of being
unable to work.

Her last works were brightly-coloured
pastels of women and children.

She stopped painting
entirely in 1914.

In 1915, Cassatt's long-standing
friend, Louisine Havermeyer,

staged a New York exhibition
of work by Cassatt and Degas,

alongside her
collection of old Master paintings.

Giving her full support,

Cassatt sent every single work that
was still in her possession.

All proceeds from the entry fees

and sales founded
the Woman Suffrage Campaign Fund.

Among the 18 works by Cassatt in the
exhibition

was Woman with a Sunflower.

This painting here in the collection
of the National Gallery was one

that I became instantly attracted to
because it was so ambiguous.

It's a painting that because of its
prominence in the collection

has been remarked upon quite a bit

but was always written off as a
sentimental image of a woman

and a child, and in fact, when the
painting entered the collection

of the National Gallery,
it was retitled Mother and Child.

What kept nagging in my mind about
this painting

was that there was this enormous
sunflower

that it's so central to her
composition,

and yet I couldn't
figure out what it was doing there.

I was reading the minutes
from the annual convention

of the National American
Women's Suffrage Association

and noticed that there was a
sunflower

on the cover of their pamphlet.

And as it turns out,
in the 1890s,

the NAWSA adopted the Sunflower
as their official symbol.

And she paints this around 1905,

when she's really beginning
to devote herself

to the movement of feminism
and of suffrage.

This was never something that had
ever been drawn out in scholarship,

and the original title of the
painting

in French was La femme au tournesol,

which means
"the Woman with the Sunflower",

and was hanging here under the title
Mother and Child.

There was a conference at American
University,

the Feminist Art History Conference,

and I came down from New York to
present this research about Cassatt,

criticising the
National Gallery of Art

for displaying this painting under
a title

that covers up the original
intent and meaning of the painting.

But luckily the head of French
painting here was very excited

to learn of my research and told me
that I had to absolutely come work

on the painting, and the title has
now been restored

to its original
title of Woman with a Sunflower.

Mary Cassatt died on 14th June, 1926,

in her Chateau Beaufresne
at the age of 82.

If ever there was a truer artist,

it was Mary Cassatt.

Always steering towards the highest
ideals,

undaunted and unflinching,

her hand upon the tiller,

she has kept true to her course

through all the storms of adverse
criticism,

of raillery and discouragement.

"I have touched with a sense of
art some people...

"..they felt the love and the life.

"Can you offer me anything to
compare to that joy for an artist?"

(REFLECTIVE PIANO MUSIC)

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