Oil on canvas - The Philadelphia Museum of Art This work was also unusual for its time in its depiction of a well-bred woman performing a physically active (if still genteel) task. ![]() The small girl, dressed in pale pink, sits quietly beside the woman who holds the reins this contrast between youth and adulthood, experience and learning, is one of Cassatt's many moments of psychological observation. Cassatt honed in tightly on her subject, cropping the horse at the left side of the composition and the carriage at the right side and bottom. The setting is the Bois de Boulogne, a large, verdant park that was a popular meeting place and a scenic destination for pleasure rides. The models for this painting were Cassatt's sister, Lydia, and Degas's young niece. In addition to capturing the life of domestic interiors, theaters, and opera houses, Cassatt also trained her gaze on figures in Paris's parks and gardens, some of the few public spaces where respectable women could move freely in society. Oil on canvas - Museum of Fine Arts, Boston When Cassatt exhibited In the Loge in Boston in 1878, one critic praised it by writing that Cassatt's work "surpassed the strength of most men." The main figure may be watching the stage or observing her fellow theatergoers while she herself becomes the subject of the man's gaze meanwhile, the viewer, who is placed just beside the woman, takes in the entire scene. ![]() Cassatt has perceptively grasped the fact that the members of the well-dressed audience are putting on their own performances for one another. The black of her dress is echoed in the clothing of other figures in the background, including a man several boxes down who regards her through his own glasses. The woman's profile is set off against the red velvet and gilt decoration of the box seats behind her as she raises a pair of opera glasses to her eyes. This canvas shows a stylish woman attending a daytime performance at the Comedie-Francaise, a famous theater in Paris. Through her business acumen and her friendships and professional relationships with artists, dealers, and collectors on both sides of the Atlantic, Cassatt became a key figure in the turn-of-the-century art world and helped to establish the taste for Impressionist art in her native United States.Her material was occasionally dismissed as quintessentially "feminine," yet most critics realized that she brought considerable technical skill and psychological insight to her subject matter. ![]() Cassatt's art typically depicted domestic settings, the world to which she herself (as a respectable woman) was restricted, rather than the more public spaces that her male contemporaries were free to inhabit.This versatility helped to establish her professional success at a time when very few women were regarded as serious artists. Cassatt's work combined the light color palette and loose brushwork of Impressionism with compositions influenced by Japanese art as well as by European Old Masters, and she worked in a variety of media throughout her career.
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