The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (63 page)

Healy could not have felt better about his work and the whole change in the life of the family. One daughter, Mary, would marry a French writer and professor, Charles Bigot. Another, Emily, chose to become a
nun and took her vows in the great house at Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. Son George decided to study architecture in Paris rather than return to college in the United States. For the genial Healy himself much of the pleasure of Paris came from providing generous hospitality to young American artists who had come to “study hard,” as once he had, and to give them encouragement.

Mary Cassatt, too, had been hard hit by the Chicago Fire, and her loss, though nothing like what happened to the Healy family, had also led to her return to Paris.

Like Henry James, she had spent a good part of her childhood in Paris in the company of a well-traveled, well-to-do family and was said to have shown her earliest interest in art there at age seven. In 1866, at twenty-one, traveling with another young Philadelphia painter, Eliza Haldeman, she had returned to Europe to study and paint, much of the time in Paris, where she entered the studio of a distinguished portrait painter, Charles Chaplin, one of the few French masters who held classes especially for women. She made copies of masterworks at the Louvre, painted in the nearby countryside, worked hard and steadily.

I think she has a great deal of talent and industry [Eliza Haldeman wrote in a letter to her mother]. One requires that latter living in France, the people study so hard and the results are wonderful. … The difference between Americans and French is that the former work for money and the latter for fame, and then the public appreciate things so much here.

In an atelier at Villiers-le-Bel, Mary studied with George Healy’s old friend Thomas Couture. Later, in 1868, she was in Paris when one of her paintings,
A Mandolin Player
, which showed clearly the influence of Couture’s spirited, unacademic style, was accepted and hung in the Salon. She exhibited the work under her middle name, Mary Stevenson. “It is much pleasanter,” Eliza Haldeman explained, “when one is a girl as it avoids publicity.”

For Mary her time in France had determined she would be a professional, not merely “a woman who paints,” as was the expression. Commenting in a letter on just such an acquaintance, she was scathing: “She is only an amateur and you must know we professionals despise amateurs. …”

With the outbreak of the Prussian war during the summer of 1870, she had headed home to Philadelphia, where she kept painting but felt so deprived of the presence of great art at hand, so downhearted, that she was nearly ready to give up. Thinking Chicago might be a better market for her work, she went west to investigate, traveling with two of her cousins. And thus she was there when the city burned. Neither she nor any of her party suffered any injury, but two of her paintings on display at a jewelry store were destroyed.

Returning to Philadelphia, she resolved to change her life. “Oh how wild I am to get to work, my fingers fairly itch and my eyes water to see fine paintings again,” she wrote to another Philadelphia friend and fellow painter, Emily Sartain. By December the two were on their way to Europe.

They found Paris bitterly cold and smothered in fog. It had been less than a year since the final agonies of the siege, only six months since the Bloody Week. “The Hôtel de Ville seems like a Roman ruin. … the fog was so thick everything was lost at fifty feet off,” wrote Emily. “I could scarcely see the pictures in the Louvre, it was so dark.”

She and Mary soon moved on, this time to Parma, in Italy, to work with a teacher, Carlo Raimondi, who told Mary, “Don’t be disheartened— remember you can do anything you want to.”

The following spring Emily left Mary at Parma to join her family in Paris. On one excursion out of the city, they passed the site where one of the great battles had been fought between the French and the Germans and where the dead, they were told, were buried in eight enormous pits. A putrid smell still hung in the air.

At Parma, Mary worked on, concentrating especially on paintings by Correggio, and making such progress that she began to draw attention. In Paris in the spring of 1872,
Galignani’s Messenger
carried an article from the
Gazzetta di Parma
in which a distinguished Italian art critic,
Parmetto Bettoli, wrote of seeing a copy of the Correggio masterpiece
L’Incoronata
, done by a young American:

I must candidly confess that when I am called to criticize feminine essays in the Fine Arts or
Belles-Lettres
, my eulogisms are generally qualified by the restriction embraced in the phrase, “It is not bad for a woman.” But as regards this picture I find myself in a very different position. The copy of this great work, executed by Miss Cassatt, betrays such a surprising knowledge of art that a male artist, no matter how great his experience, might feel honored at having the authorship of this work attributed to him.

Later, from Madrid, Mary wrote to tell Emily that she had discovered Velázquez. “Velázquez oh! my but you knew how to paint!”

She worked without letup, in Madrid and Seville, then Antwerp for a summer, then Rome for seven months, with intermittent stops in Paris, which, she claimed, she had come to dislike.

In 1873, after a series of rejections of her work by the Paris Salon, she learned that one of her Spanish paintings, a large canvas of a bullfighter and his lady, had been accepted.

The pull of Paris proved too strong. Back in the city in 1874, after years of roving over half of Europe, she said she had come to stay. “She astonished me by telling me she is looking for an atelier here,” wrote Emily Sartain. “She has always detested Paris so much that I could scarcely believe it possible … but she says it is necessary to be here. …”

Mary Cassatt had been born in 1844 in western Pennsylvania, in what was then known as Allegheny City on the opposite side of the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh. Her mother, to whom she was devoted, was Katherine Kelso Johnston, the daughter of a Pittsburgh banker of Scotch-Irish descent. Her father, Robert Simpson Cassatt, whose forebears were French (the name was originally Cossart), became the first mayor of Allegheny
City and succeeded so rapidly in finance and mercantile enterprises that by the time he reached his early forties he felt ready for retirement, whereupon he moved the family east, settling first in Lancaster County.

Mary was the fourth of five children. The oldest, Lydia, was followed by two brothers, Alexander and Robert. The youngest, Joseph, arrived when Mary was five. Childhood was set in perfect comfort, amid books and fine furniture, and in as handsome a country home as could be found in Lancaster County. But the mother and father had desired city life and so moved to Philadelphia. Then followed four years in Europe—two in Paris, two in Germany—at the end of which the family returned to Pennsylvania, first to West Chester, outside Philadelphia, then Philadelphia again.

They were not people of immense wealth, rather, as they would have said, they were respectably “comfortable.” Refined in their tastes, they frowned on ostentation. The children attended the best private schools. Good grammar and proper manners were insisted upon. Everyone dressed well, and father Robert Cassatt continued to see no necessity for a return to gainful employment.

At sixteen Mary, “Mame,” as she was called in the family, enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on Chestnut Street. When, at twenty, she announced her wish to continue her studies abroad, her father exploded, declaring he would almost rather see her dead than become an artist. But Mary persisted. She always persisted. He gave his consent and was not known to have ever regretted it.

The summer of 1874 she spent back at Villiers-le-Bel working with Thomas Couture. That fall she rented a studio in Paris and, with sister Lydia, moved into a small nearby apartment on the rue de Laval (now Victor Massé) at the foot of Montmartre.

The course of her life was set. If becoming a
professional
artist—never a “woman who paints”—meant giving up marriage and a family of her own, so be it. She was adamant, at times even abrasive, on the matter.

Her appearance remained consistently, entirely ladylike. She stood not quite five feet six, considered tall for a woman. Her hair was light brown, her chin a bit sharp for her to have been considered pretty. Hers was a strong, intelligent face. The grey eyes were large and alert. And she had the slender figure and perfect carriage for her well-tailored ensembles.

“Miss Cassatt’s tall figure, which she inherited from her father, had distinction and elegance, and there was no trace of artistic
négligé
, or carelessness, which some painters affect,” wrote Louisine Elder of New York, who was struck even more by how much Miss Cassatt knew and how animated she became.

Once having seen her, you could never forget her—from her remarkable small foot to the plumed hat with its inevitable tip upon her head and the Brussels lace veil without which she was never seen. She spoke with energy, and you would as soon forget her remarks when she conversed as to forget the motion of her hands.

Louisine Elder and Mary Cassatt met in Paris in 1874, at a time when Mary’s work was going well, her name becoming known in art circles in both Paris and New York. (She listed herself now as Mary Cassatt.) A portrait of hers,
Madame Cortier
, had been hung in the Salon.

In Paris with her mother and two sisters, nineteen-year-old Louisine was eager to see and learn as much as possible. She was enthralled by all that the vibrant Miss Cassatt had seen and accomplished, the places she had been, and wondered how she had ever summoned the courage to go off to Italy and Spain.

Mary took her to the opera and theater, talked long and fast about Correggio and Velázquez. “I felt that Miss Cassatt was the most intelligent woman I had ever met and I cherished every word she uttered. …” It was the threshold of a fifty-year-long friendship of far-reaching consequences.

At the same time, another friendship went on the rocks. For Emily Sartain, Mary’s strong-willed, occasionally dictatorial ways became too much. There was a dispute over some unknown matter and bitter feelings resulted. “Miss C. is a tremendous talker and very touchy and selfish, so if you hear her talking of me at home, as she has done lately in Paris, you will know the origin of it all,” Emily confided to her father. “I shall never become intimate with her again. …” Emily went home to Philadelphia to teach at the School of Design for Women, where she would have a long, distinguished career.

Not long afterward, in 1875, Mary discovered the work of a new group of artists who called themselves La Société Anonyme des Artistes—the Impressionists, as they were to be known, among whom were Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, and Edgar Degas. In much the way the American painter William Morris Hunt had the direction of his career changed by seeing a portrait by Thomas Couture in a Paris art store window, so Mary Cassatt reacted to seeing for the first time pastels by Degas in a window on the boulevard Haussmann.

“I would go there and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his art,” she would remember. When she said later, “It changed my life,” she was by no means exaggerating. It changed her life because it changed her work. An entirely new way of seeing and painting, for which she was to become famous, began then.

She took Louisine to see a Degas pastel titled
Répétition de Ballet
(Ballet Rehearsal) and urged her to buy it. “It was so new and strange to me!” Louisine wrote. “I scarcely knew how to appreciate it, or whether I liked it or not … [but] she left me no doubt as to the desirability of the purchase and I bought it upon her advice.”