(HOST) There’s an important show of the American Impressionist Mary Cassatt currently at the Shelburne Museum. Commentator Tom Slayton is editor-emeritus of Vermont Life magazine. He was there and has these thoughts.
(SLAYTON) As I perused the current Mary Cassatt exhibit at the Shelburne Museum, I found myself pondering that perennial conundrum: What makes an artist great? What qualities contribute to artistic genius?
It is an important show, with more than 60 works – easily the most expensive show ever assembled by Shelburne Museum, and one of the best recent presentations of Cassatt paintings, prints, and drawings.
She is perhaps the leading American Impressionist painter, the only one to live most of her life in France, where she studied with the great Edgar Degas. Her prodigious talent caused Degas himself to declare: "I do not admit that a woman can draw like that!"
Her works are strikingly beautiful. But as I looked at them I kept musing on the qualities that define genius. Mary Cassatt, it seemed to me, had many of them.
For one thing, she was completely sure of herself and her destiny. From her earliest days, she knew she would be an artist, and she was unwavering as she followed that star. Born in Philadelphia, she moved to France as a young woman and because of her very obvious talent was quickly admitted to the French Academy – the home of the fashionable salon painting of the Victorian era.
But Cassatt was dissatisfied with that sort of polite, formulaic painting. She knew the sort of art she wanted to create, and she was unwavering in her pursuit of it. She went where the artistic action of the late 19th century was, joined the artistic rebels of the day, the Impressionists, and became a student of the great Degas.
Genius can either go wide (as in, say, Walt Whitman’s poetry) or deep. Mary Cassatt went deep. Her chosen field – domestic scenes, the private world of women, portraits of mothers-and-children – might seem limited. But like all great artists, Cassatt found the depths of that small world and probed the psyches – perhaps even the souls – of women, as they had never before been probed by an artist.
She has been described as the "Jane Austen of painters" for her ability to take a confined social setting and find the infinite depths within it. No other painter has depicted so well the sacred qualities of everyday life, the dignity and complexity of women, the dignity and worth of children.
Throughout her life she had one overweening goal – to paint the best, most important paintings she could paint. But her complete dedication to artistic excellence took its toll. Mary Cassatt painted women and children, but she never married.
And so we have the great irony of her life – that this artist, who painted the deepest and most important paintings on the theme of mother-and-child since (at least!) the Renaissance, never had children herself. She gave that up for her art.
Perhaps that’s the sort of price that artistic greatness demands.
At any rate, thanks to her friendship with Louisine Havemeyer Webb and the Webb family’s Shelburne Museum, we are the beneficiaries of her genius – and her sacrifice.